A pop song is on the radio, synth beating like a heart and a young girl’s voice too perfect to be human. Clarisse taps her fingers on the steering wheel in time to the music for a few measures, and then turns the car off. She’s wearing sunglasses so I can’t see her eyes.
“We need to talk about Oliver,” she says. Her voice sounds cooler than I remember.
“What is there to talk about? He’s alive. That’s all that matters.”
“He’s a fucking vegetable, Evelyn. You call that alive?” Clarisse asks. She doesn’t wait for my answer. “What if he wakes up? Have you even thought about that?” She looks straight ahead, her eyes fixed on the low chop of the water, the small waves glittering in the sunlight.
“He doesn’t even know our real names, Clarisse. He has a brain injury. So even if he does wake up, he might not be able to talk, let alone pick us out of a lineup. He probably won’t even remember anything anyway. His brain is mush.” I reach over, and place one hand on her shoulder, my touch so light on her skin I can barely feel her at first, can only sense the presence of her body near mine.
“You don’t get it, do you?” She spits the words at me, pulling her body away from my touch. “You just don’t fucking get it.” Her voice is louder now, angry. “I came here to tell you that I never want to see you again.”
“But he’s alive. Oliver’s alive. We didn’t kill anyone.”
“You went inside Emerald’s house. You thought about killing her. I know you thought about it.”
“No, I didn’t think about it. I just wanted to see her. She’s my grandmother. You thought I was going to go all that way and not at least see her? I ran out of her house as soon as she realized I wasn’t her neighbor.”
“You’re such a fucking liar. Stay away from me or I’ll go to the police.” She pounds the steering wheel with her fist. “Fuck, I can’t believe I ever bought into your bullshit.”
“What bullshit, Clarisse? I didn’t do anything to Emerald. And even if I thought about killing her, bad thoughts aren’t the same as bad actions, Clarisse, remember? And by the way, if bad thoughts are a crime, then I guess the police will want to know about yours.”
“Don’t threaten me, you fucking psycho. I don’t ever want to see you again. Don’t call me. Don’t text me. Don’t come near me or I’ll tell the police everything I know.”
“Please, please, Clarisse. I’m sorry. I’m sorry about all of it. But it’s all over now. The tests are over now. We passed. We both passed. We’re both going to be okay. Everything’s going to be okay. Let’s just forget this ever happened and start over. Come on, Reesey Cup.” I reach for her, but she slaps my hand away.
“I’m not your Reesey Cup, and I don’t want to see you ever again. You hear me, Evelyn? Do you understand? If you even try to come near me, I’ll go to the police. I’ll tell them everything.”
I nod my head, yes, I understand. A sick feeling begins inside me, the cells of fear dividing and dividing again, blooming like algae in the sea. Fear churns inside me, a storm at sea. My body becomes a small boat tossed within the relentless waves.
I close my eyes and cover my ears. I just need to block everything out for a bit—Clarisse, the sunlight, the children playing at the edge of the water. I just need to blunt the sharp edge of my senses so I can catch my thoughts, which are barreling through me as fast as a bullet train. I’m still here in the car with Clarisse, but in my mind, I’m in an interrogation room, sitting across the table from a man who demands to know where I was that night in May, demands to know why traces of me were found under Oliver’s fingernails, inside his mouth, between his legs.
Clarisse starts the engine and turns the air-conditioning on full blast. “Don’t fucking try me, Evelyn,” she says. “From now on you’re dead to me. And if you don’t stay dead, I promise you’ll pay for what you did. They’ll put you in Raiford with your father, where you belong, you fucking freak.”
I look to the horizon, an attempt to steady my churning stomach. My eyes are blurry, my vision watery as if the world were a snow globe turned on its end.
Clarisse drives back to the other side of the bay, over water that glistens in the sunlight. The whole way home I hold my hands against my chest, feeling the beating of my own heart.
When Clarisse pulls up to the curb in front of my house, she keeps the car in drive. She stares straight ahead through the windshield, keeping both of her hands on the steering wheel. I get out of the car without looking at her, and as soon as I close the car door, she drives off. I go inside the house and straight to my room.
Shea hears me, and comes to the threshold. “Back already? I figured you two would be out all day. Perfect beach weather today. There’s not a cloud in the sky.”
“Oh, well, I’m not feeling so great,” I say. “I think I might be catching a cold.”
“Sorry, sweetie. Can I get you anything?”
“I’ll fight it off. Just going to rest,” I tell her.
“Yes, honey, get in bed and take a nap,” Shea says. “I can bring you some echinacea tea when you wake up later. It’ll help boost your immune system.”
“Okay, thanks,” I say as Shea closes the door.
I peel off all my clothes, leaving them in a puddle on the floor. I grab a can of duster from my nightstand drawer, and take it to bed with me. The sheets are cold against my bare skin, but eventually, my body adjusts. I enjoy the sensation, how it’s slightly uncomfortable at first, almost painful, but then it feels so good, like diving into a cold pool, your lungs contracting hard as you come up for air and gasp, your breath taken away from you for just a second from the temperature change.
I open The Catalog of Everything I’ve Done Wrong, but there are too many entries to add today, and I don’t want to think about them, so instead, I put the duster nozzle into my mouth and pull the small trigger.
I inhale and instantly feel lighter, starting to imagine myself floating away. At first I fight the feeling slightly, afraid to let go, but then I inhale again and finally every muscle in my body becomes weightless, and I let the waves wash me away and away until I’m back in Clarisse’s closet. We’re sitting crisscross, facing each other, our knees touching so that the empty space between our bodies forms a diamond shape.
“Let’s play hot hands,” Clarisse says. She reaches her hands toward mine, her palms facing up, an animal offering me her soft underbelly. I place my hands on top of hers, feeling the silk of her skin.
“Ready?” Clarisse asks.
“Ready,” I answer.
I open my eyes, but I still see Clarisse. She appears to be standing at the foot of my bed now, getting undressed. She slides into bed with me.
“You’re here,” I say, and I turn on my side to face her. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
Clarisse reaches over, and wraps a strand of my hair around her finger. “Of course I’m here, Evelyn. Where else would I be?”
Chapter Thirty-Four
The group at Wavelengths is smaller than usual tonight, but that doesn’t bother Greg. In fact, it only serves to bolster his enthusiasm. “Smaller group just means more room for deeper conversation,” he says as he removes empty chairs from the circle, and motions for all of us to scoot closer together. We obey, moving in to make a tighter arc. We create a smaller replica of the universe with our atomic bodies.
“Out of sight, out of mind,” Greg says in a declarative voice. “We’ve all heard that before. And it can be true, right? If you don’t see something, it can be easy to forget that it exists.” Greg scans our faces, searching for the light of recognition, signs that we understand. “If someone you love is away from you, regardless of the reason why, it’s only natural that they move into the background, and that might make us feel bad, as though we’re forgetting about them, as though we don’t care about them. I want you all to know that’s completely normal, and it’s okay. It doesn’t mean that you don’t care about them anymore. It doesn’t mean that they don’t care about you. Let’s talk about
that tonight, and perhaps some of you will want to share how you deal with those feelings when they arise.”
Clarisse isn’t here tonight. I keep scanning the room to find her, hoping she’s just hiding somewhere, testing me just to see if I’ll notice her absence.
Greg sees my searching, and meets my eyes when I finally turn them back to him. “We can have relationships with people who are kept away from us,” Greg says. “No matter why they’re gone. We can carry people with us even though they must stay in one place.”
It looks as though I’m here in the room, listening to Greg and the others talk about maintaining relationships, about grounding techniques and coping skills, but in my mind, I’m adding an entry to The Catalog of Everything I’ve Done Wrong: stole county property.
I’m on a street corner at night, not far from Clarisse’s house. I’m sitting on her shoulders, and she holds me steady as I work to free a yield sign from its metal frame. She couldn’t believe I’d never done it before, assured me that it was easy. “Nothing to it,” Clarisse promised.
“What if we get caught?” I’d asked, my hands trembling as I held George’s socket wrench and a can of WD-40.
“Ev, it’s three o’clock in the morning in Seffner,” Clarisse said. “It’s the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere. Just trust me.” I could feel the warmth of Clarisse’s body beneath me, her hands on the tops of my legs as she steadied me.
I sprayed the lubricant on the hex bolts just as Clarisse had told me to do. She’d reviewed the entire process with me while we were still in her bedroom. Jenny and George were sleeping in their rooms on the other end of the house. Clarisse was sure we could sneak out and back in without waking them.
The WD-40 greased the bolts, making them slippery enough so I could pry them off.
“You’re almost there,” Clarisse said quietly, cheering me on with a whisper in the dark of night. The only other sounds in the air were high-pitched insects mingled with our hushed breathing.
When I eventually freed the red-and-white sign from its post, I tossed it down into the grass, and Clarisse took both my hands in hers. She lowered herself down so that I could slide down her back, my bare feet finally touching the damp grass as I exhaled a sigh of relief.
“What now?” I asked, and Clarisse kissed me on the cheek.
“Now we celebrate,” Clarisse answered. She picked up one side of the sign and gestured for me to pick up the other. We walked side by side, back to her house. We slipped in through the patio door, and tiptoed back to her bedroom. After stashing the sign in Clarisse’s closet, we took hits from a small glass pipe, and I got higher than I ever had before. I started to feel panicky, my heart racing, agitated. I started crying, and told Clarisse that the weed was too strong. I couldn’t breathe. Clarisse took my hand and placed it against her chest. She told me to feel her heartbeat and then focus on slowing my own heartbeat down to match. When that didn’t work, she fetched a wet washcloth from her bathroom, putting it over my face until I stopped freaking out, until I started giggling so bad that I had to suck on one end of the washcloth so my laughter wouldn’t wake Jenny and George.
After group ends, Greg is standing at the cookie table, sipping coffee from his travel mug, surveying the room the way a proud parent would. I’ve never approached Greg after group, although he’s always told us that he is available to talk before and after each session. I walk up to him and say hello, take a cookie from the plastic tray, oatmeal raisin, and start to eat it.
“Great group tonight, Evelyn. Don’t you think?” He looks at me, raising his eyebrows, his way of inviting conversation.
“Yes, good stuff, as usual,” I answer. I look down at my feet, and kick at some cookie crumbs on the floor, a little trail of sweetness for the palmetto bugs that are probably hiding in the walls just waiting for the lights to go out, their version of night falling.
“Thanks, Evelyn,” Greg says. “I’m really glad that you’re here. You are a valuable member of Wavelengths. You can really be a resource for others.” He takes another sip of his coffee, and then reaches in his pocket for a tin of peppermints, offering one to me.
“Thanks, Greg,” I say, putting a peppermint in my mouth, exhaling icy breath from the cool sensation of the mint. “Hey, I actually wanted to talk to you about something, if that’s okay.”
“Absolutely,” Greg says. “What’s up?” He puts the tin back in his pocket, and sets his travel mug on the cookie table, his body language making it clear that he is ready to listen to me.
“You mentioned one night that you do individual counseling too. How does that work, exactly? Is that something I could do?”
“I’m a social worker for Hillsborough County Schools. I move around to the different buildings within the district as needed, but I have an office at Blake High School, near downtown Tampa, and I’m able to see clients there. If you’re interested, I can e-mail your mom with the info, and we’ll arrange an appointment.”
“Yeah, I’d like that,” I say.
“Great. Is everything okay?” Greg asks.
“Sure, everything’s fine. I guess I just have some things I want to talk about, but not in front of the whole group, you know?”
Greg nods in agreement. “Yes, I know exactly what you mean. That’s a great step to take for yourself, Evelyn.” He looks serious at first, but then his expression turns softer and a smile begins to spread across his face. “I’m looking forward to starting this part of the journey with you, Evelyn.”
“Me too.”
In the car on the way home, Shea sings along to Father John Misty, his warm tenor mixing with her alto, sound waves suspended in the air. She drives fast with the windows up and the AC on until we cross over into Pass-a-Grille. Then she drives slower, rolling down the windows so we can feel the salty evening air.
“So what do you have left to do for the semester?” Shea asks. I’ll be done with school at the end of the week, the summer stretched out before me like an empty canvas.
“One more trig exam and an essay on The Crucible.”
“Hey, I read that in my junior year of high school too. It’s about the Salem witch trials, but it’s an allegory for McCarthyism, right?”
“Yep.”
“So what’s the topic of your essay?”
“John Proctor as the tragic hero.”
“Don’t you just love literary analysis, Evelyn? Boiling something down to its absolute essence—it just feels so…satisfying.”
“Mmm-hmm,” I say as Shea pulls into our parking space.
In the living room, my mother is preparing for a summer break painting project. The TV is on and tuned to Animal Planet, a documentary about birds of prey playing in the background while she works. She tears a long strip of blue painter’s tape off the roll with her teeth, pressing it into the space between the windowsill and the glass. Then she grabs a wet rag from a bucket and begins wiping the baseboards.
Shea gives my mother a kiss on the cheek. “Stepping out for a smoke, babe,” she says.
“I thought you were quitting,” I say. I sit down on the couch, grab a pillow, and hug it to my chest.
“Not this week,” my mother says and gives Shea the shame on you gesture, the one where you point at the person with the index finger of one hand and then use your other index finger to make a rubbing motion, like rubbing two sticks together.
Shea feigns an embarrassed look. Then she laughs and opens the sliding glass door. A whiff of hot night air escapes into the room before she slides it closed. I can smell the honeysuckle that blooms by the patio, a hint of something sweet suddenly in the room.
My mother pauses her work and sits down next to me on the couch. She’s wearing her typical cleaning attire and her hair is hidden under a New York Yankees baseball cap. Her eyes look tired but happy. She’s breathing deeper than usual, one of her calming techniques. I wasn’t born yesterday. I know my mother is about to have a conversation with me, that there’s something on her mind. It’s
always a giveaway when Shea abruptly excuses herself.
“What’s up?” I ask to speed up the process. She usually benefits from a little nudge.
“Well, I want to check in with you,” my mother says. “I feel like I haven’t even seen you much since Treasure Island. We really never got a chance to talk about it.” On the TV screen, a red-tailed hawk circles a cloudless sky in slow motion while a baritone voice narrates. My mother inches her body a little closer toward mine. “And I thought you might want to talk about it.”
The hawk trains its eyes on a field mouse, and dives down, down, down. He pierces the prey with his talons, which are dark and curved and razor sharp. He grazes the ground for a just a split second, and then flies up, up, up into the blue. The narrator explains that the mouse never stood a chance, as though the inevitability makes it easier to handle, a reminder that out there in the wild, it’s only about survival.
“Okay, then let’s talk. What do you want to know?”
“Well, was it a little intense for you to see Ella’s house?” She adjusts her hat by the brim, lifting it up slightly and then pulling it down, nearly covering her eyes.
“A little intense, yeah. But it was fine,” I say. The hawk lands on a bare tree branch, ready to enjoy his hard-earned lunch.
“I was on the fence about the whole visit at first, as you could probably tell.” My mother laughs softly, a nervous little laugh. “But in the end, I’m very happy that we went. It gave me a sense of closure, and I hope that it did the same for you.”
Closure. Greg talks about that at Wavelengths from time to time. The families of my father’s victims are seeking it, and they may feel it when he’s executed—when they hear his final words, when they watch him take his final breath.
“It did feel like an ending,” I tell my mother. I say it because that’s what she wants to hear. I say it because it’s true.
Girl at the Edge Page 17