“It’s no problem. I think I could take you if you turned on me.” He winked, and Evelyn laughed. She actually laughed, as if this weren’t a terrible, screwed-up situation. Another sign that returning had been the right decision. “But I do appreciate the coffee,” he added, touching his cup to hers in a toast. “Cheers.”
“Cheers,” she answered, still smiling as she tipped the cup to her mouth.
“I’m Noah, by the way.”
“Evelyn,” she responded.
“Well, Evelyn, your timing is perfect. I was just going to switch out the display pieces in the window. Want to help me choose?”
Of all the scenarios that had been tumbling through her mind all day, this hadn’t been one of them. “Seriously?”
“Sure. I’m all on my own here. It’d be great to have another eye.”
“But I . . .” But I’m not qualified. I’m just a housewife. I’m nobody. I’m losing my mind.
He watched her expectantly. Expectantly. Like he really wanted her there and hoped she’d say yes. When was the last time someone had truly wanted something from her? “I’d love to,” she heard herself say, and she was rewarded with a wide smile. His eyes crinkled. They were dark brown and so much warmer than her husband’s blue.
“Come on. Let’s finish our tour so you know what you’re working with.”
“All right, but I’ll warn you, I can be a little opinionated about art.”
“That sounds perfect.”
Her body flushed with pure pleasure, and for the first time in so long, Evelyn’s world settled, and she was calm.
CHAPTER 4
BEFORE
A soft rumble emanated from the kitchen floor, vibrating up through Evelyn’s heels, tightening her body as each second passed. She could feel the jolt of Gary’s feet hitting the treadmill, a steady beat like a heart. Or perhaps it was more like the march of a faraway army coming closer.
As she stared into her cup of coffee, the whir of the treadmill stopped. When the shower in the exercise room’s bathroom wheezed to life, she knew Gary thought she was still sleeping. He planned to shower down here, then sneak out before seven.
Usually he made a big show of turning on lights in the bedroom and opening and shutting doors, letting her know that he found her tendency to sleep late irritating. Some mornings she could feel his irritation tipping more toward contempt. But she hadn’t slept late today. The excitement of the night must have worked some of the drugs out of her system. She’d woken with a gasp at 6 a.m., with no fuzziness muffling her thoughts.
Her husband was cheating on her.
What had been merely a wisp of an idea the night before was crystal clear in the morning light. Her husband was cheating, and Evelyn’s calm, cozy world was about to fracture in some way. She didn’t know how yet, but what she’d built here was done.
The sound of water rushing through pipes stopped with a suddenness that left her ears ringing in the silence. She got up and dumped her cold coffee into the sink. Her stomach was too sour for it anyway.
When she leaned against the counter and closed her eyes, that ghost woman appeared from the woods, blond and beautiful and slim. Gary touched her, his hands on her shoulders as if he’d touched her a hundred times before. As if he’d spent hours touching her.
Tears burned behind Evelyn’s eyelids. They scorched her throat, her chest. She was flooded with acid. She couldn’t breathe or swallow. A door opened down the hall. She shook her head. She didn’t want to have this conversation. She never wanted to have it.
For a moment, the possibility blossomed. She didn’t have to say anything. Didn’t have to demand answers. She could pretend her medication had erased all but the most basic details from her mind. The car, the road, the deer, the end.
His footsteps came closer, hard-soled shoes on natural stone tile, clack, clack, clacking until they stopped abruptly and that ringing silence returned.
“Evelyn?”
For that one moment, he sounded vulnerable. She’d caught him off guard, exposed, and those three startled syllables made him sound more like the boy she’d fallen in love with than he had in years.
Yes, he’d been cocky even at twenty-six, but he’d been less certain, still unsure of his place in a new residency program. Years later, when she’d realized his confidence was actually arrogance, she’d forgiven him that flaw, hadn’t she? Didn’t that mean she deserved his respect and love and fidelity?
“What are you doing up?” he asked, that old annoyance with the world seeping back into his voice.
She opened her eyes and faced him. “Who is she?”
His mouth twitched as if he’d caught a whiff of something rancid. She was ruining his plan for the morning. “I told you. She’s a patient.”
“A beautiful patient.”
That twitch again. “I suppose.”
“A beautiful patient you were having dinner with.”
“No. I was having dinner with Dr. Christiansen. You knew that. A patient called, in crisis. She was panicked. Demanding to see me.”
Evelyn frowned, some of her righteous anger slipping away. Could that be the truth? “You don’t see patients after hours. You haven’t for years.”
“What else could I do? She was in the middle of an anxiety attack and already driving to my office.”
She felt her stupid, weak-willed head begin to nod in agreement before he’d even finished speaking. But then she realized she had him. She’d caught him. She didn’t need to accept this paper-thin lie disguised as an explanation. “If she drove her own car to your office, why would she have been in your car at all?”
She expected to see a moment of confusion cross his face. He’d fallen into a trap. He must be surprised. But he only shook his head as if he were disappointed in her.
“I told you. She was having car trouble. Or that’s what she said, anyway. I’m not sure I believed it, but she was near panic. I gave her a Klonopin to calm her down. Hell, even after the pill and thirty minutes of reasoning, she was still upset. You saw her. She couldn’t drive in that state.”
That much was true. The woman had seemed distraught. But had she been distraught because of a panic attack or because Evelyn was there? You wouldn’t want to meet your boyfriend’s wife that way, after all.
“I saw the way you touched her,” Evelyn insisted.
“Touched her?” he snapped. “Are you kidding me? I grabbed her to try to stop her hysterics. Jesus, Evelyn.”
She saw him gripping that woman’s shoulders again and remembered being surprised his hands hadn’t sunk right through the flimsy white form of her body.
Evelyn pressed a hand to her forehead. If only she hadn’t been so tired, so high, she would know. She would trust her instincts. But what kind of instincts made you think a ghost had walked from the forest?
Maybe he was telling the truth.
“Evelyn,” he said, her name softer on his lips now. “I’m sorry. Your reaction is totally logical. I was out at night with another woman. Anyone would assume the worst. But I swear, she’s just a patient.” He moved across the kitchen, his shoes clacking more slowly as he approached. He wiped his face of irritation, and his eyes softened with something like understanding. His favorite Armani blazer was slung over his arm, his graying hair still damp above his ears. It all seemed so normal.
Was it?
“I understand why you’re suspicious, but it doesn’t make any sense that I would’ve called you if I was with another woman that way. I’m not cheating on you, Evelyn.”
It definitely wouldn’t make any sense to call her. That much was true. She could grab onto that.
Her hands trembled with relief. Gary wasn’t cheating. The cracks that had been expanding through her world stopped their progress. Everything held together. She let out a long, low sigh.
Gary smiled. “I’m really sorry I scared you that way.”
“I just thought . . .”
“I know. I should’ve explained more last night, but
I was upset by the whole thing, and you were already asleep when I got home.”
She nodded.
“Let’s do something nice this weekend. Vigo’s?” He named her favorite restaurant, and Evelyn latched onto that kindness in relief.
“Tonight?” She didn’t think she’d have the strength. Her muscles felt like rags now that all the adrenaline had leached away.
“Not tonight. I’ll be late.”
“You’re kidding. Even after this?”
Gary held up his hands in surrender. “The AMA dinner, remember? You didn’t want to go.”
Right. She’d begged off. She never felt as if she had anything in common with the women at these annual dinners. Which was strange, considering so many of them were doctors’ wives just like her.
“Tomorrow,” Gary suggested.
“All right. Tomorrow. Vigo’s.”
He kissed her cheek, and despite the way she always poked fun at his ninety-five-dollar shaving lotion, it smelled good. Comforting. Familiar. She tipped her head up for a kiss on the mouth. That was comforting too.
“Can you share the Toyota with Cameron today? I need to get the BMW checked out before we drive it.”
“You drove it home last night. Was something wrong?”
“Maybe. The steering felt off. I’ll take it in next week.”
She didn’t want to share her son’s car all weekend, but she supposed she couldn’t be churlish about it. Gary hadn’t been injured in that crash, and her marriage wasn’t over. She should be feeling gratitude.
“No problem,” she said. “I’ll drop him off at school.”
He glanced at the clock. “I’d better get going. Shouldn’t he be up by now?”
And just like any other day, Gary was annoyed that Cameron had inherited Evelyn’s love for sleeping in, which was funny, considering that he’d inherited every other trait from his father. Shouldn’t Evelyn be the exasperated one, trapped in a house with two perfectionists?
But she kissed Gary one last time and trudged upstairs to wake her son. She’d drop him off at school and come back to wash the dishes and throw a pot roast in the slow cooker for dinner. Then she’d return to the school for her paid eleven-to-four shift in the office and put in another hour or two of volunteer work organizing the book fair.
Just an average day for her average family. Everything was back to normal.
CHAPTER 5
AFTER
When Noah flipped on the back-room lights, Evelyn found a rather austere storage space instead of the art wonderland she’d been hoping for. Her eyes caught on the nearest object, a square shrouded by a plastic sheet. “What’s this?” She lifted the plastic and exposed a white metal stand.
Noah said, “Prints,” just as she spotted the edges of rows and rows of matted paper filed like medical records.
“I didn’t see any out front.” She tipped the first print up and found a watercolor. Not her taste, but she could understand why it would be popular. “Oh,” she said then, dropping the print and pulling her hand back. “I’m sorry. I’m poking around as if I belong here.” And she didn’t belong. Not at all.
“I said I’d show you the whole place. It’s no problem. I don’t sell many prints, but there are a couple of shop-local events on this street every year, and I have to have something to sell that costs less than nine hundred dollars. Funny enough, those ten-thousand-dollar sculptures don’t move at sidewalk sales.”
“Surprising.”
“I buy prints from regional artists and some of the national folks who are popular at the local art festival. Every once in a while, I roll that stand out on the sidewalk and bring in fifty dollars in sales to buck up my spirits. Now, are you ready to break open some crates?”
The grin that overtook her face startled her. The muscles felt stiff, stretching uncomfortably at the strangeness of such a carefree movement. “Do I get to use a crowbar?”
Noah grimaced. “I’m afraid I oversold that. They’re just cardboard boxes. Pretty sturdy ones, though.”
“You’re ruining my idea of what a gallery is like behind the scenes.”
“Yeah, this is as romantic as it gets, I’m afraid.” He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans and glanced around the room. Evelyn’s eyes followed his gaze.
With this second look around, she saw that what looked like gray blobs of plastic were actually covered pieces leaning in stacks against the walls. There were two four-foot-high cardboard boxes near a wall of articulated metal that looked like a smaller version of a garage door. In the farthest corner of the room sat a large table outfitted with all sorts of measuring lines. “You do your own framing?”
“Saves money,” he confirmed. “I worked in a frame shop during college. And after. Geology work at its finest.”
“You’re taking a risk bringing up that geology degree again.”
“Are you going to bolt?” His tone stayed as light as hers, and she liked him trying to put her at ease.
“I am really sorry about yesterday.”
“Don’t worry about it. Let’s get to work.”
Work.
This wasn’t her work. She knew that. Her work was tedious, endless, repeating. Her work was cleaning and washing and planning and ticking boxes for people who only noticed that work when you failed to do it. But as she walked toward the boxes, anticipating what treasures she might find inside, this felt real. More real than any work she’d done in years.
Noah cut the rigid plastic straps that webbed around the thick cardboard. He handed her a screwdriver and together they unsealed the top flap of the first box.
She’d expected to find packing peanuts or clouds of that shredded paper that always fell out of crates in movies. But this was like any other box of goods delivered these days. Bubble wrap and rigid blocks of Styrofoam. A little disappointing.
But then it wasn’t disappointing anymore. Then it was the faint scent of oil paint and the promise of three stretched canvases, white edges marked with red and orange and gold. They removed the bars of Styrofoam together and he helped her ease the first canvas free of its prison.
“Oh,” Evelyn breathed.
“I thought you’d like her.” She could hear the smile in his voice, but she couldn’t look away from the painting. Poppies, she thought, though she wasn’t a gardener. Orange poppies that were done in such thick, crazed strokes, they’d become almost abstract.
“It’s beautiful. Who’s the artist?”
“Jennifer Beckenbauer. I went to a tiny art festival in Charleston last year and snatched up two pieces. They sold within a month. You can see why.”
She could. The work was beautiful enough to appeal to nearly any consumer, but bold enough to make Evelyn’s heart shake.
“She’s getting better,” Noah said, almost to himself. “And she’s only twenty-eight.”
Only twenty-eight. My God. That felt so far away. This girl was just starting out. Everything was in front of her. And she could do this? She was only a baby.
But she wasn’t, of course. Evelyn had been a mother at twenty-eight. A wife. A homemaker. At twenty-eight, she’d already been done.
Grief tried to rise inside her. Fury. Horror. But there was the painting, and two more behind it, and a whole other box to unpack, so Evelyn shoved the grief down and made herself feel pleasure instead.
And it wasn’t that hard. It felt easy here. Noah talked more about Jennifer Beckenbauer and then about the next booth at that Charleston art festival, where the woman had carved old shriveled-up apples into creepy doll faces. Evelyn was suddenly laughing so hard that tears streamed from her eyes.
They propped the three Beckenbauer pieces on the table to take them in from a distance as they opened the other box. This one wasn’t quite as satisfying. More watercolors. That medium had never been Evelyn’s favorite. It was too pale and formless. Like her.
After that, Noah uncovered the works he had in storage, determined to give her the fullest range of options for the front wind
ow.
She had no awareness of time passing, not until they were interrupted by a soft chime. Noah glanced toward a corner, and for the first time, Evelyn saw the monitor. A small black-and-white screen with a tilted view of the front door, and walking through that front door was all the grief and fury Evelyn had tried to shove down.
Juliette Whitman.
Evelyn drew a breath so sharply that it hurt her throat. She’d forgotten this woman for a moment, for the first time in nearly three weeks, but here she was, walking into her own husband’s art gallery. Of course she was. Of course.
But then Noah said, “Lunch is here,” and the blonde glanced up toward the camera with a smile, and it wasn’t Juliette at all.
“Lunch?” Evelyn whispered.
He winked and slipped past to speak to the girl. Evelyn stayed where she was, knees locked and hands trembling. She’d forgotten. She was with Juliette Whitman’s husband, and somehow she’d forgotten why she’d come here in the first place.
How was that possible? It must have been that connection between them, the sticky web that bound them together. He felt it too, obviously. Why else would he have acted so happy to see her?
The girl laughed at something Noah said, and Evelyn looked back to the monitor, but they were somewhere out of range of the camera. It was just the door on the screen, still as a photograph, and she realized he’d been able to see her yesterday when she first entered. The way she’d hesitated and wiped her sweaty palms on her skirt. Had she looked scared? Suspicious? Or had he only seen an utterly nondescript middle-aged woman?
The girl reappeared on the screen just as Noah walked back into the room, a white paper bag clutched in his hand. “Was that your wife?” she asked, deciding that she had to get back to the heart of this. Juliette.
“My wife?” He laughed.
She glanced to his wedding band. “You’re married, aren’t you?”
“I’m married, yes. But that was a delivery girl.”
“Oh, I thought maybe your wife brought you lunch.”
“Well, that would be nice, but it’s just my favorite sandwich shop. They bring my lunch every day at eleven before they get busy.”
Evelyn, After: A Novel Page 3