Chapter 18
EVANGELINE
Max is awake when I open my eyes.
The grey light is at the edge of the curtain.
The clock on the dresser says six-twenty.
She is on her back beside me, one arm folded under her head, the other across her stomach, and she is looking at the ceiling.
She has not slept. Her eyes are open and her breath is the low quiet breath of a woman who has been counting it in fours through the night.
Six-twenty.
She was supposed to be in the city by six.
I do not say it. I lie still beside her with the quilt up to my shoulder and I let her have the count of breaths she is having, and after a long while she turns her head and she looks at me, and her face does the small thing it has been doing in the morning, and then she says, "Hi."
"Hi."
"You slept?” she asks.
I nod.
"Good,” she says.
"You did not?” I respond, almost knowing the answer.
"No."
"Are you all right?” She is different. She is afraid. I can feel it. She doesn’t want to let me go.
"I do not know,” she pauses then, “Evangeline."
"Yes."
"I am not going to the city this morning."
I nod.
"I am not going to the city Tuesday either."
"I figured.”
She is quiet a count.
I put my hand on her chest, low, where the flat line of muscle is at the bottom of her sternum. I feel her heart. The heart is going at the rate she keeps it at, which is slower than mine, which is the rate of a woman who has chosen her breath for many years. Underneath it I can feel fear.
"Tell me what she said," I say.
She does not answer.
"Max."
"Yes."
"You do not have to tell me what she said.
I am asking. You can tell me a small piece.
You can tell me no piece. You can tell me at the end of the day or in three days or never.
I am only asking because the silence is the loudest thing in this room right now and the silence is going to be louder by lunchtime. "
She is quiet a count.
"She told me to put you on a bus to Boise this morning."
"All right."
"She told me you were the worst thing I have done."
"All right."
"She told me if it comes out, I am in a federal courtroom in a chair next to her."
"All right."
"She told me Tuesday at ten Elise Warren is going to ask me questions I cannot answer if I have been lying to her about you for six days."
"All right."
"She told me to drive you to the bus station and not write to you and not look for you and to ask her in a year if you have not been found by anyone else."
"All right."
"And I told her I cannot do that.”
"All right."
She turns her head on the pillow and she looks at me.
"You keep saying all right."
"It is the only word I have this morning. I learned it from you.”
"All right."
I laugh.
It is the first laugh I have laughed this morning and it is small and tired and a little surprised, and her face does a thing I have not seen it do, which is a soft small thing at the corner of her mouth. She is letting me see her tired. She has not let me see her tired before.
"Max."
"Yes."
"Stay in bed with me. No need to get up.”
"I have things."
"What things?”
"I should make calls. I should think."
"It is six-twenty in the morning."
"Yes."
"Stay in bed with me."
She looks at me a count.
"All right."
---
I make us coffee at eight.
I bring it back to the bed. I sit cross-legged on top of the quilt in her henley and the wool socks of hers I finally put on, and she sits up against the headboard in her undershirt with her hair messy and the quilt across her hips, and we drink coffee in the bed at eight in the morning like two women in a cabin who are not waiting on the road for a sound.
"Tell me about you," I say.
"What about me?” She seems suspicious as she always does when I ask any questions about her.
“Tell me about when you were a child."
"Evangeline." She sighs and I think she won’t respond.
"You do not have to. We do not have to talk. I am offering conversation. I would like to get to know you more.”
"All right."
She drinks the coffee and takes a minute.
The cup is in both her hands. She is looking at the cup.
"Reno," she says.
"My mother was a cocktail waitress. My father was the man who came in for shifts on Tuesdays.
I lived with my mother in a one-bedroom apartment on Wells Avenue from the time I was born until I was sixteen.
She worked nights. I made my own dinner from when I was nine.
I was good at it. The thing I was best at by twelve was rice.
I could put a dinner on the table for the two of us by the time she came home at one. "
"What did you make."
"Rice and ground beef. Rice and chicken. Rice and a can of tomatoes. Rice and an egg if it was Wednesday."
"Wednesday."
"Wednesdays we ran low. Eggs were what we had on Wednesdays."
"All right."
"I lifted weights at the high school gym from when I was thirteen.
I was not interested in being a girl. I was interested in being able to carry things.
I joined the volunteer fire department in Reno when I was sixteen.
I lied about my age. I told them I was eighteen.
They knew I was sixteen and they let me on because the chief had been a friend of my mother.
I rode an engine for the first time in February of my sixteenth year and I knew before we got to the call what I was going to do with my life. "
"Sixteen."
"Sixteen."
"And the academy."
"At nineteen. I came up here to Redwater for the academy because the program was cheap and because I wanted to be away from Reno."
"And Val."
"Val pulled me out of a class of thirty in the third week.
I had broken my nose against a brick on a forced-entry drill and I would not cry.
She said Hale. I said yes ma'am. She said come with me. I came with her. She was the lieutenant who ran the academy that year. She was thirty-three. It was a different time. She had a wife back then. It didn’t last. Lena came in 2017. "
"Lena."
"Yes. Lena is her wife now. She is a firefighter too.”
"You like Lena?”
"Yes. I was skeptical at first. I thought Val would lose focus. But Lena has been good for Val. She has found her softness. She has given her strength.”
She drinks the coffee. She sets the cup on the dresser. She looks at me.
"What about you?”
"When I was a child?”
"Yes."
I take a minute.
I sit with it because I have not told anybody about my childhood since I was twenty-four and I told a woman at a poetry reading in Manhattan, and the woman at the poetry reading repeated a story I had told her at a party two months later, and I stopped telling people about my childhood after that.
I have not told Daniel about my childhood.
I told Daniel pieces of my childhood. I have not told a person the shape of the whole thing in eleven years.
I tell her.
I tell her about Sag Harbor and the house with the white columns and the long lawn that ran down to the water.
I tell her about my mother's roses. I tell her about the boat.
I tell her about my grandmother who lived in the carriage house and who taught me to bake bread before I was eight.
I tell her about my father, who was a man who built a financial firm out of his father's small one and who made a great deal of money and who loved me in the way that men of his generation loved daughters, which was a way I am only now beginning to forgive him for.
I tell her about my mother dying when I was twelve, of an aneurysm, on a Tuesday afternoon in the kitchen, in front of me.
I tell her about boarding school. I tell her about the year at Brown.
I tell her about quitting Brown to marry Daniel because I was twenty-five and I was lonely and Daniel was thirty-eight and Daniel knew the words to say to a twenty-five-year-old woman who had been lonely since she was twelve.
I tell her about my marriage.
I tell her about the rooms. I tell her about the dinners.
I tell her about the men in dark suits who came on Thursdays and whose names I was not allowed to ask twice.
I tell her about the year I asked. I tell her about the way Daniel responded to the asking, which was not a way I had any words for at the time and which I have words for now.
I tell her about the soft room. I tell her about the eleven years of small careful no's I told myself were a kind of dignity.
I tell her about the morning I stopped telling myself the no's were dignity.
She listens.
She listens the way she has listened to me since Tuesday, which is the way of a woman who is letting the words stand without putting her own words on them. She does not interrupt. She does not put her hand on me. She lets the telling be the telling.
When I am done she puts her hand on my knee.
"Evangeline."
"Yes."
"Thank you."
"Stop."
"No."
I laugh. The laugh is a wet laugh because I have cried somewhere in the telling and I had not noticed, and she lifts her thumb and runs it under my eye.
"I have not told a person all of that ever.”
"All right."
"I told you in one morning."
"Yes."
"Max."
“I’ve got you,” she says and I believe her.
She does not move her hand off my knee.
We sit like that.
---
We do not get out of the bed until eleven.