Chapter 20
EVANGELINE
Iam a missing woman in a cabin in the woods.
She took me from my burning house and kept me here. Had sex with me. And loved me. And now I love her.
I made a chicken. It is in the oven and smells good.
I have not made a chicken in eleven years.
Daniel did not eat chicken. Daniel ate fish on Mondays and lamb on Wednesdays and a rotation of three pasta dishes on the other nights, and we ate at eight on a long table that was polished every Tuesday by the woman who came to clean, and on Saturdays we ate at the club.
I have not made a chicken since I was twenty-two years old in a kitchen I shared with two other girls in a flat above a bookshop in Providence.
The chicken is in the oven at three-fifty.
The potatoes are on the stove.
The bread is on the cutting board because I made bread today, and the bread is good, and the kitchen smells of rosemary and butter and bread, and the lamp is on at low on the counter, and the note she left me at five in the morning is folded twice on the table by the window.
Back tonight. Lock the door behind me. M.
I have read the note nine times.
I am at the window at six o'clock with a glass of the wine I found in the pantry, and the sky over the pines is purple at the rim, going grey, and the road from the highway is empty.
She said back tonight.
She did not say what time.
I drink the wine. I go back to the kitchen. I check the chicken. I baste it with the butter and the lemon and the rosemary. I close the oven. I wash my hands at the sink. I look at my hands. The pink skin on my left palm is new and tight and a little shiny in the lamplight.
My ring and chain are still in the dish in the bedroom.
I have not put it back on.
I am not going to put it back on.
I think this for the first time with certainty at the sink with the lamp on at low and the chicken in the oven and the bread on the board, and it is a sentence that arrives as a fact, like the water from the tap.
I am not going to put the chain back on.
I am not going to put the ring back on the chain.
The ring is going in the brass dish and it is staying in the brass dish until I decide what to do with it, and what I decide to do with it is going to be a thing I decide alone.
I dry my hands.
I go back to the front room.
I curl into the corner of the sofa with the wine and the quilt and the book she put on the side table for me last week, the one about the woman in the lighthouse, and I read three pages and I do not take in a word of any of them, and I look at the door.
She said back tonight.
It is six-twenty.
I read three more pages.
I look at the door.
It is six-forty.
I do not put the book down. I keep the book open on my lap because if I put the book down I will go to the window and I will stand at the window and I will watch the road, and I will be a woman watching the road for her woman, and I am not going to be that woman tonight.
Tonight I am a woman who made a chicken.
Tonight I am a woman with bread on the board and wine in her glass and a robe she likes on her body, and I am going to be reading when the headlights come up the road, and she is going to come in and see me reading, and she is going to put her boots by the door and her coat on the hook and she is going to walk over to the sofa and she is going to put her hand on the side of my face and she is going to say my name, and I am going to put the book down then, and not before.
I read three more pages.
I look at the door.
It is seven.
The headlights come up the road at seven-oh-six.
I hear the engine before I see the lights.
The engine is not her truck. Her truck has a low rumble at idle and a small hesitation when she shifts into second, and I have learned the sound of her truck at the bottom of the road the way I once learned the sound of Daniel's car in the drive at the house in Sag Harbor when I was eleven years old waiting for him to be my father, and this is not her truck.
This is a heavier engine.
This is a pickup with a cleaner idle.
I sit up on the sofa.
I put the book down.
I pull the robe closer at the throat.
The engine cuts in the drive. A door opens.
A door shuts. There is one set of boots on the gravel.
The boots are slow. The boots are not Max's boots.
Max's boots are fast on gravel. Max's boots come up the porch steps in two strides and the screen door catches the inside of her shoulder because she does not slow for it. These boots are slow.
The boots come up the porch steps one at a time.
There is a knock.
Three short knocks. Hard. The knock of a person who has knocked on doors for a living.
I do not move.
The knock comes again.
"Mrs. Clark."
I stand up.
I stand up because the woman on the other side of the door has just used a name that is also not the name I am going by inside this cabin, and she has used it like a fact, and I feel the floor under my bare feet, and I feel the cold air at the gap under the door on my ankles.
"Mrs. Clark, I am Chief Valentina Mercer of the Redwater City Fire Department. I am here on official business. I would like you to open the door."
I look at the brass key on the counter.
I look at the chicken in the oven.
I look at the door.
I walk to the door.
I open it.
She is taller than I expected. And broad.
She looks like she could carry me up a mountain.
Maybe in her youth. She must be sixty now.
Her hair is dark grey. She is in a uniform shirt with bars I do not know how to read, and a coat over it and her face is a face that has seen the inside of a thousand bad nights, and her eyes are slate, and she looks at me as though I am a problem she has come to solve.
"Mrs. Clark."
"I am not going by Clark."
"Mrs. Clark, I am going to come in."
She comes in.
I step back. She comes in past me into the front room.
She is an intimidating woman and the air seems to part around her.
She does not look at the kitchen. She does not look at the chicken in the oven or the bread on the board or the wine on the side table.
She looks around and her face does not move.
It is impossible to know what she is thinking.
She closes the door behind her.
She does not lock it.
"Sit down, Mrs. Clark."
"I would prefer to stand."
"Sit down."
I sit down. I sit down on the sofa with the quilt at my knees and the robe at my throat and the wine on the side table beside me, and she stands in the middle of the front room with her hands at her sides.
"Mrs. Clark."
"My name is Evangeline."
"Mrs. Clark, I am going to tell you something, and I am going to tell it to you once, and then I am going to ask you to leave this house, and a cab is going to come up the road in twenty minutes, and you are going to be in it."
“I won’t.”
“You will.”
"This is not your house."
"It is my firefighter's house. And what belongs to them belongs to me.” She says it with the confidence of someone who believes it.
I look at her.
"Mrs. Clark."
"Stop calling me that."
"Mrs. Clark, on the night of October fourteenth, at oh-three-fifty hours, a fire was set at the east wing of the Clark house on county road seventeen. The fire was set with a road flare and a small accelerant trail. The fire was set by Max Hale.”
My heart drops.
Of course a small part of me suspected this. But I had tucked that tiny part away and buried it because it suited me more to have sex with the woman who rescued me and cared for me. It suited me more to fall in love with Max.
The room does not move.
The room is very still and the lamp is on at low and the chicken is in the oven and the bread is on the board and the cabin smells of rosemary and butter and bread.”
“You are lying."
"I am not."
"She rescued me. She saved my life.”
I want to believe this with every fiber of my being. I love her. I need this to be true.
"She set the fire. Then she went back in. She pulled you out because she could not bear what she had done. Then she put you in her truck and she brought you to her cabin and she has been keeping your mind on sex so you wouldn’t see her lies.”
"You are lying."
"Mrs. Clark."
“Don’t call me that!” I am angry. I shout.
"She did not rescue you. She kidnapped you. She has kept you captive in this cabin for eleven days. She has lied to my department about who you are and where you are. She has had sex with you and apparently now you can’t think clearly. I thought you were an educated intelligent woman Mrs. Clark?”
"Stop."
"She lit the match. She killed your husband. Do you know what it is like to die suffering in a fire Mrs. Clark?”
She lit the match. She killed my husband. She kidnapped me. Truths I have conveniently lost along the way of the past week.
Kidnapped you.
Max killed my husband. She kidnapped me.
But, she also saved me. Two weeks ago, I wanted to kill myself. She has set me free.
But then also she has not told me the truth.
In all these days she has not told me the truth.
She has held my hand and she has put me in her bed and she has put her mouth on my body and her fingers inside me and still she has not told me the truth.
I open my eyes.
The fire chief is looking at me. Her eyes look black.
"Mrs. Clark."
"How long has she been doing this?”
"What?” the Chief asks, although I’m pretty sure she knows what I mean.
"Setting fires."
"This is the first one."
"How could you know?”
"Because I would know. Because I have been her chief for seventeen years.”
"Then why would she do something like this?”
"Mrs. Clark."
"Why?”
Val takes a long breath.
"I do not know yet. I have not finished asking her.
I will finish asking her when I have you out of this house and in a place where she cannot find you and you are safe, and I will finish asking her, and when I have an answer I will turn her in or I will not, and that is not your concern, and it is not your problem, and you are going to get up off that sofa and you are going to put on your shoes and you are going to get in a cab. "
She looks at me.
"You will go upstairs and you will put on whatever clothes are in the closet and you will come back down and you will put your shoes on and you will get in the cab."
"Where will the cab take me."
"To a hotel in Boise. The hotel is paid for.
There is an envelope in the cab. Inside the envelope is cash and a phone and a name and instructions.
You will use the cash. You will use the phone.
You will use the name. You will not call her.
You will not write to her. You will not come back to this cabin or this county or this state, you will not come back at all. "
“I won’t do it. I won’t leave.” I think of Max. I can’t leave her. I won’t.
“Oh, you will.” The Chief doesn’t seem to doubt this for a second.
"You love her?” I say. “You love Max.”
She does not answer.
"You came yourself."
"I came myself."
"Why?”
"Because she is mine. Because she has been mine since she was nineteen years old. Because I am not going to send a stranger to do this in my place. Because if I am going to break her heart tonight, Mrs. Clark, I am going to do it with my own hands, and not on a phone, and not through a deputy."
I close my eyes.
I open them.
"I want to see her."
"No."
"For five minutes."
"No."
"To say goodbye."
"You will not say goodbye to her tonight, Mrs. Clark, because if you say goodbye to her tonight she will put you in her truck and she will drive you to Mexico, and then I will be the woman who has to put a federal warrant on the firefighter I love, and I am not going to do that. So you are going to go upstairs, and you are going to put on clothes, and you are going to get in a cab, and you are going to leave a woman who set a fire that nearly killed you, and you are going to do it because that is the right thing to do, and because you disappearing saves Max.”
The lamp is on at low.
The chicken is in the oven.
The bread is on the board.
The brass key is on the counter.
The note is on the table.
Back tonight. Lock the door behind me. M.
I stand up.
I go up the stairs.
In the bedroom I open the closet. I pull on some jeans and a sweater that smells of her, and a pair of her wool socks, and I look at the brass dish on the dresser with the chain and the ring inside it, and I take the chain out of the dish, and I put the chain in the pocket of the jeans, and I leave the ring in the dish.
I leave the ring on the dresser of the woman who killed my husband and if I am honest with myself I know it to be true.
I go down the stairs.
I take the chicken out of the oven and I turn the oven off and I put the chicken on the counter beside the bread, and I do not say a word, and Chief Mercer does not move from the middle of the front room, and I put Max’s coat on at the door, and I put her shoes on, and the cab comes up the road at seven-thirty-one with a single headlight blinking and a yellow magnet on the door.
I walk down the porch steps.
The chief is behind me.
She does not touch me.
The cab driver is a man in a baseball cap who does not look at me.
He gets out and he opens the back door for me, and there is a manila envelope on the back seat, and there is a phone in a plastic bag, and there is a stack of cash in a paper band, and there is a folded sheet of paper on top with a name on it I do not recognise, and the envelope has my new self in it.
I get in.
I put my hand on the door before I close it.
I look at Chief Mercer in the porch light.
"Tell her."
"What."
"Tell her I made a chicken."
The chief does not answer.
I close the door.
The cab pulls away from the cabin.
I look out the back window.
The cabin gets smaller.
The road bends.
The cabin is gone.
I sit in the back of the cab on the highway south and I do not cry. I do not cry on the highway. I do not cry at the on-ramp. I do not cry in the dark with the man in the baseball cap who does not look at me. I do not cry at the county line.
I cry forty miles in.
I cry once.
Then I do not cry again.