Chapter 12
EVANGELINE
Iwake up alone in her bed and the cabin smells like coffee.
She has been and gone. The note on the french press says Stew in the fridge.
Eggs. Bread. I'll be in by seven. M. She signed this one.
The M is small and square and held its shape when she lifted the pen.
I stand at the counter in her henley and her sweats and I run my thumb along the little stem of the letter M, which she had not written yesterday, and I put the note in the pocket of the sweats.
I make coffee.
I stand at the kitchen window and I drink it and I watch a crow on the porch rail.
My body is sore in a way my body has not been sore since I was a girl learning to ride.
The bottom of my stomach pulls when I lean over the sink.
The inside of my thighs is tender. My wrists are faintly pink where the rope was, and my lip is a little swollen on the lower where I must have bit it, and I look at myself in the glass of the kitchen window and I do not recognize the woman in the glass.
That is not a bad sentence. It is a neutral sentence about a new woman.
---
I look for the internet.
I have been a woman in a cabin for four days and a woman who will not guess at passwords, and both of those facts are still true this morning, and a third fact is new, which is that I have had the taste of Max in my mouth for ten hours and I have earned the right to know what the city is saying about me.
That is the way I put it to myself. I am not sneaking. I am earning.
Her laptop is still locked.
I put the lid down.
I walk the living room again, slower this time, and I stand in front of the bookshelf. On the third shelf, behind a row of biographies, I see a slim dark rectangle I had not noticed. I take it off the shelf.
It is an old tablet.
It is not locked. It wakes with a tap. The home screen is a photograph of a porch in morning light with a pair of bare feet up on the rail. Not hers. A pair of slim female feet with a small tattoo on one ankle. The photograph is old. The date in the corner says 2019.
I feel something in my chest I don't have a word for yet.
I put it aside. It's not mine to interpret. I open the browser. The browser launches to a home page of bookmarked newsfeeds, the kind a woman who does not sleep much reads at three in the morning. National news. A fire-industry site. A long-form site. A small-town paper I don't know the name of.
The WiFi joins itself.
I type in the search bar.
I type Clark fire Redwater.
The screen fills.
---
I read.
I read for an hour. I read for two. I sit on the sofa with the tablet on my knees and the quilt from the bedroom over my shoulders, and I read every story the internet has about the fire and about Daniel and about me.
Daniel's body was recovered Tuesday morning. Cause of death: smoke inhalation with second-degree burns, as the medical examiner. He did not burn alive. He did not wake up. That is the one thing I find that I am glad to know, and the gladness is small and I do not look at it long.
The cause of the fire is listed as under investigation. Kessler's preliminary report, leaked to the local paper by somebody whose name has been kept out of it, says possible electrical origin in the lower-level panel room, pending arson board review. The paper has put quotes around possible.
My name and face is everywhere.
Evangeline Clark, thirty-six, wife of the late Daniel Clark.
Missing since the night of the fire. Last known to be booked on a trip to Aspen that was not claimed at the hotel.
The paper has a photograph of me at a benefit dinner two years ago.
The photograph is the three-quarter profile, pearls, hair up, the mouth not quite smiling.
I look at her and she looks like a woman I do not know and used to be.
The press conference.
My father gave a press conference on the steps of his house in Sag Harbor yesterday afternoon.
He wore a dark sweater and a dark coat and he stood behind a small microphone that his attorney had set up.
He read a statement. He said, Evangeline is my only child.
I have not spoken to her in six months. I am asking anyone with information about her whereabouts to contact the Redwater City Police Department.
I have lost enough already in my life. Please.
The please.
I watch the clip three times. I watch him say please.
My father has not said please to me in my adult life.
He looks old. He looks small. His hair is gray along the part.
The woman he lives with stands two feet behind him and does not touch him.
He does not cry. He reads the statement and he steps back and the attorney takes the microphone and says they will not take questions, and my father walks back into the house, and the clip ends.
I sit with the tablet on my knees. I put my hand flat on the black screen after it fades. I sit with my hand on it.
I think: he would be so relieved.
I think: I cannot call him yet.
Both are true at the same time.
---
I read about my husband.
Daniel's business interests are being laid out across the business section of three different papers.
Investments in shell companies. Offshore accounts.
A real estate holding company whose partners are under FBI indictment.
A commodities brokerage with ties to a man in Chicago who is currently serving seven years.
The phrase that keeps coming up is long-standing concerns.
The phrase that comes up once in the third paper and then gets picked up by the first is federal grand jury empanelment.
There was going to be a grand jury.
He was going to be indicted. Within six months. The fourth paper says so plainly in the last paragraph, sourced to a person they call an official familiar with the investigation.
I sit with that.
My husband was going to be indicted. He was going to be indicted and he was sleeping alone in the east wing since Tuesday because he knew it was coming and he had been drinking through dinners in the primary suite and the suite had started to smell like his fear and he had moved rooms to give that smell somewhere to live that was not where I slept.
I did not know he was going to be indicted.
I did not know because Daniel did not tell me.
Daniel never told me. Daniel had been carrying a thing he could not put down for three months and he had gone into the east wing with a decanter and a reading lamp and he had not shared the weight of it with me, which was the last kindness he ever did me in a marriage whose kindnesses had been thin.
I am not surprised.
I am not surprised that he was dirty. I have known he was dirty for six years, in pieces, in hallways, in the cast of men who came to his Thursday dinners whose names I was not allowed to ask about twice. I have known. I have not known the grand jury. I have known enough.
I am not surprised that someone wanted him dead.
I sit with that too.
I read about the list of people who wanted him dead.
The paper is careful not to name them but the paper lists them in categories.
A competitor on the commodities side who lost forty million in a trade two years ago.
A former associate who had spent time in federal custody and had come home angry.
A man in Chicago who had been, the paper says cautiously, disappointed.
Any of those men could have done it.
Someone has done it.
Someone has done it and the police do not know who, and I know the shape of it, and I have not yet decided what I know. I have two theories, which I have had since Monday morning in this kitchen, and I am not going to collapse them into one yet.
I hope they do not want me dead.
I had nothing to do with it. I knew a fraction of what I should have known about my own husband's business.
I am thirty-six years old and I was kept, by him, in a soft room.
If anybody looks at me with the questions the grand jury was going to ask, I will not be able to answer them.
That is what I would tell a man in a dark suit. That is what I would tell my father.
I hope they do not want me dead.
---
I put the tablet down.
I put the quilt off my shoulders. I stand. I walk to the window. I look out at the drive and at the pines.
I think about leaving.
I think about it plainly, the way I thought about not calling on Monday.
I sit with it, as a thing I could do. I could walk to the shed and find a coat.
I could walk to the road. Walking, I could be at the county road in three miles, and at the Millard diner in another six, and from the Millard diner I could call the number my father gave me in a card on my twenty-ninth birthday, and my father could have a car at the Millard diner in six hours.
I could be on Long Island by tomorrow.
I could be in my father's guesthouse by tomorrow evening, showered, in clothes that fit me, calling an attorney, giving a statement to the Redwater City Police Department that I had walked away from the fire in shock and had been in a motel near the highway all week.
I could do that.
I look at my hand on the window sill.
The pale band on my finger has gone. It has faded out.
In five more days I will not be able to find it with a flashlight.
I am in a stranger's kitchen in a flannel shirt that smells like her, and I came apart in her arms last night in a way I did not know a body could come apart, and the woman who did that to me is in the city this morning, lying for me.
I know she is lying for me.
I have known since Tuesday, and I knew again last night, and I know this morning.
Whatever she is, she was somehow there when the fire that killed Daniel was blazing, and she has pulled me out of it, and she is carrying me now in a bed in a cabin in the forest, and she is carrying the weight of carrying me in whatever rooms she stands in by day.
I think maybe she is dangerous.
She is not dangerous to me.
I am only saying this out loud this morning.
She touched me last night when I asked her to. She gave me sex that was transformative. And I can’t stop thinking about it. And her.
If I leave today, she is in a room tomorrow that does not have me in it, and she has to reckon with whatever she did on Monday night without the woman in her bed that she did it to save.
She saved my life.
I do not want her to reckon alone.
That is the sentence.
I stand at the window and I turn the sentence over and over in my mouth and I cannot make it into a different sentence.
I do not want her to reckon alone.
I do not want to reckon alone either. I have been alone in rooms for eleven years, and yesterday I was alone in a cabin for a day and I was not lonely the way I have been lonely for eleven years, and last night I was not alone for the first time in my life, and the not-alone was not a thing I was going to walk away from on day five.
I do not walk away.
I sit down on the sofa. I pick the tablet up. I clear my search history and my browser cache. I put the tablet back on the shelf behind the biographies, at the same angle it had been at, because I am a woman who was raised to put things back.
I put the stew on the stove.
I make bread.
---
I am still in the kitchen when the truck comes up the drive.
She comes up the porch the way she came up the porch Tuesday night. She stops at the mat. She pulls off the boots. She sets them heel to heel. She hangs the jacket on the peg. She takes a long breath and she turns and she sees me.
I cross the kitchen.
I put my hand on her chest. I put my mouth on hers.
I kiss her.
She makes a small surprised sound against me and then her arms come around my back and she lifts me six inches off the floor, one arm under my thigh and the other around my ribs, and she walks me two steps to the counter and she sets me on the counter and she kisses me the way I want to be kissed forever.
She breaks off.
"Hi."
"Hi."
"You all right?”
"Yes."
"You?”
"I read the news."
She looks at me.
She waits. She does not ask.
"I read about my husband's grand jury. I read about my father. I read about the list of people who wanted him dead, and I thought about whether my name was going to come up on the list."
"Your name is not on the list."
"How do you know."
She looks at me.
"I know things.”
"Max."
"Yes."
"I am not going to ask you questions tonight I think I might know the answer to."
"Okay."
"I am also not going to ask you questions I am afraid of the answer to."
"Okay."
"That is tonight."
"Tonight."
"Tomorrow I might."
"Tomorrow you might."
"All right."
She lets her forehead drop to mine.
She lets it stay there a count.
"I was worried about you today," she says.
"I was fine."
“I’m glad.”
"Max."
"Yes."
"I'm not leaving."
She closes her eyes.
She does not answer. I put my hand on the back of her neck. I feel the breath go out of her into the space between our foreheads.
"Say okay," I say.
"Okay."
"Say it again."
"Okay."
"Look at me."
She looks at me.
Her eyes are wet at the corner, which I did not know Max Hale's eyes could be. I do not point it out. I kiss the corner of one and then the corner of the other. I kiss her mouth once and press my tongue between her lips.
"Make me dinner," I say.
"Yes."
She picks me up off the counter like I weigh nothing and she sets me back on my feet.
She crosses the kitchen to the stove. She stops.
"Evangeline."
"Yes."
"I'm not leaving either."
I don't say anything. I don't have to. I stand at the counter and I watch her lift the lid off the pot I had set simmering at four, and she smiles at the pot, and she puts the lid back on, and she gets two bowls from the shelf, and the pine ceiling over our heads holds, and the pines outside the window hold, and the light holds, and in the bookshelf behind me a tablet holds the search history of a woman choosing to stay.