by Linda Holmes
She hustled around to the other side of the car. “Thanks,” she said as she realized she was getting the seat of his car wet. “I think my dad forgot to pick me up.”
“That’s okay. I remembered.” He smelled like cinnamon gum.
“Thanks.”
“Oh, no problem.” They sat in the car, and they didn’t move. “You live out by the water, right?”
“Oh! Right! I’m sorry, I live on Wexler. Do you know where that is?”
“You live near the bookstore.”
“Yeah, that’s where you turn, and then I’m down the hill.”
“Do you mind if we stop off?”
“At the bookstore?”
“Yeah. I like it in there.”
Evvie had been cold and wet with no ride home. A guy who smelled like cinnamon had picked her up in a Lexus, and now he wanted to stop at the used bookstore. “Sure,” she said. “That’d be fine. I’m not in a hurry.”
She couldn’t believe how smooth his windshield wipers were. They made the faintest, most soothing electric hum, nothing like the whappety-konk, whappety-konk of the blades on her dad’s truck. As they glided through town in the deepening dark, she felt…something. She looked over at him. “Um,” she said. “I think—it feels like the—”
“Oh, they’re heated seats,” he told her. “Great, right?”
Cute boy, dry car, bookstore trip, and now a warm ass. It was like the universe had forgotten her first fifteen birthdays and was rolling them into one big gift. “Yeah. Is this your car? It’s great.”
“It’s my car,” he said. “It’s new. Sometime when it’s not raining out, I’ll open the sunroof for you.” Sometime. He’d blinked a future into existence. It was sorcery.
“I just got my permit,” she said. “I live with my dad, and we only have his truck. I want to get a job so I can get a car, but I don’t know if it’ll happen.”
“My parents got it for me for my birthday,” he said, like he hadn’t heard her. “It’s like what they drive.”
They talked a little about classes and the new house his family had recently moved into, a big Victorian that had been owned by a local land developer named Van McCrea. Evvie told him a story she’d heard from her dad about the time Van’s wife set the kitchen on fire deep-frying a turkey indoors on Thanksgiving, and he assured her that you couldn’t see a trace of the ashes now. And then he pulled up to Breezeway Books, a little house that had been converted into a bookstore, if by “converted” you meant “filled up with shelves that hold so many used books that there’s barely room to walk, so step carefully and keep your elbows tucked in.”
You could get up to a grocery bag full of paperbacks for ten cents each, so Evvie wandered around plucking romances and mysteries until her bag was half-full. She turned a corner where a sign handmade with cardboard and markers said SCIENCE, and she ran into Tim, who was holding a hardback copy of a book called Man and His Diseases. She opened her eyes wide.
“I’m going to be a doctor,” he said. “That’s…that’s why I’m holding this book.”
She laughed. The boy with the dry car and the heated seats who wanted to go to the bookstore was going to be a doctor. And he was funny. “Ah. For a minute there, I was a little bit worried. You know, for you.”
He grinned at her. “You have a cute smile.”
She never stood a chance.
* * *
—
A breeze brought Evvie back to the memorial. One of the nurses was reading a poem. Something with angels. Something that rhymed “heaven” with “ten or eleven,” and “sky” with “cry,” something familiar. Evvie tried to place where she knew it from, thinking maybe she’d heard it from her mother, who had a soft spot for simplistic sentimentality, or had seen it on a wall hanging. It took a minute, but she finally remembered: it had been read at a very important funeral on a very highly rated television drama series. Somebody asked you to say a few words, she thought at the nurse, and you googled “poem from season finale of Cole Point.” You did. What’s wrong with you?
Dr. Schramm’s assistant brought a bouquet to Evvie and pushed it into her hands, then took an identical one to Tim’s mom. Evvie looked down at the flowers, orange and red for autumn, tasteful for grieving, and to her great relief, she felt tears start to tense her throat. Andy’s hand, soft on her back, drew them the rest of the way out. Thank God, she thought.
The good thing about a ceremony packed with busy people is that they don’t linger. The tree was planted and the dirt was shoveled, people said things about how much they’d loved and admired Tim, and Evvie felt eyes on her the entire time. She tried to breathe right, sigh right, smile right, hold the flowers right.
It was at the very end, when a former patient of Tim’s asked to say a few words, that Evvie was most sharply reminded of how devoted to him they were and what they believed he had been. The man talked about how Tim had sat by his bed and helped him figure out how to break it to his daughters that he had cancer.
When Evvie was in college, she’d come down with a flu that filled her lungs with cement for two weeks. Between classes, Tim would come sit on the bed and read to her from his biology textbook in the voices of various cartoon characters. Tweety Bird and Yosemite Sam and Pepé Le Pew told her about microbial diseases and molecular genetics. She had loved it; it hadn’t occurred to her to mind that even his close attention was a performance. In fact, it was too bad that “solid cartoon mimic” wasn’t something she’d thought to say at his funeral, because it would have sounded affectionate and been the truth, a combination she’d found hard to get right on that day.
Reminding herself that things like that had happened—that he could be sweet, and he could be fun, and he could be focused on her in a way that made her feel almost high—had kept her in the house, married to him. They were the tethers. And the rarer those moments got and the unhappier she got, the more often she picked through every bit of evidence of every day when she had ever been happy. She kept ticket stubs, dried flowers, receipts; she kept the flash cards he’d made in medical school. She kept whatever made her good memories occupy space. She threw away everything from her bad days, especially after they were married. The day after Tim lost his temper and dented the drywall throwing his phone, she donated the clothes she’d been wearing when he did it.
It wasn’t as if she’d had no early warnings, no chances to extricate herself. In the spring of Evvie and Tim’s senior year of high school, the Calcasset Small Business Association gave its Young Scholar’s Medal, and the associated $3,000 scholarship, to Zoe Crispin. She was a straight-A student who worked in the school’s tutoring program and edited the yearbook. But Tim had expected to get it himself—so much so that he’d drawn an X over the banquet date on the calendar he kept in his backpack. They were at school when he found out Zoe had won. He didn’t talk, he just bang-bang-banged his books into the locker, then he slammed the door so hard that everyone in the hall turned to look. Evvie tried to get him to meet her eyes. “Hey,” she said. “I’m sorry it didn’t turn out how you wanted.”
Tim adjusted his pack on his shoulder, shrugged, and said, “They probably had to give it to a girl.”
From time to time, late in her marriage, Evvie had fantasized about an alternate past in which she punched him in the gut and ran. But she didn’t. She nodded, she smiled, and she grabbed his hand. She said, “Probably.” And it quieted him. It ended the scene he was making, all the noise he was making. She felt older, and special, like she’d slipped through a door into the future. She knew how to settle him down; everyone noticed. She heard the next day that one of his friends had nicknamed her “TD,” and when they were having lunch outside, she asked Tim what it meant. She was afraid it would be something gross, and he hesitated to tell her, but after a while he grumbled that it stood for “Tranquilizer Dart.” Evvie blushed and took another bite of her apple.
She didn’t know then, as she would later, that he wouldn’t settle for reassurances that he’d been wronged. There would have to be justice. Tim’s father, Pete, went fishing four days later with Bill Zeist, the president of the Calcasset Small Business Association. And two days after that, the CSBA announced a new distinction: the Leadership Medal, to be given to the high school student who best demonstrated the potential for future contributions to the community. It also carried a $3,000 scholarship, and it would be given at the same banquet where they honored Zoe. The first recipient: Timothy Christopher Drake.
They’d given both medals every year since, meaning that every year, Tim’s bruised ego helped another student attend college. Every year, a room full of people gathered, without knowing it, to eat roasted chicken, honor Tim’s ego, and applaud the way his parents loved him so much that over and over, they had made him worse.
She had made him worse, too. She was the one, after all, who had graduated second in her class, right behind him, after tanking her math final because she knew how much it meant to him to be valedictorian. He first told her he loved her on the day he learned he’d edged her out.
* * *
—
Andy patted Evvie’s back, and she snapped back into her body. It was done. As people left, they gave Evvie a familiar and encouraging squeeze—some had graduated these moves from her elbow to her shoulder around the six-month mark, as a sign that it was time to buck up and stop bumming everyone out. She told everyone thank you, hugged Lila again, let Pete pat her hand again, told them all goodbye. She and Andy walked in silence to his car. “You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said, trying to keep her tone light. “Pretty painless, actually.”
“You sure?” he asked. “You’ll tell me, right? You’ll tell me if it’s too much for you? That’s our deal.”
“That’s our deal,” she said. It was their deal, and it was too much, but she couldn’t tell him why, and it was just one more thing she knew she was doing wrong.
SHE TOLD ANDY WHEN HE dropped her off that she had errands to run, then she spent the rest of the day in bed, with the quilt up to her chin, lying on her side, reading a romance novel on her Kindle. When the sun went down, she went to the kitchen for a bagel and a Diet Coke and brought them back up to her room. She ate in the dark by the light of her reader, listening to the winds that weren’t uncommon so near the water. After a while, she put the book down and lay on her back on the bed, listening. When it started to roar, she got out of bed and stretched out on the thick area rug. She waited for that feeling of floating, like she was dropping into the earth. But she couldn’t stop seeing herself from above. Couldn’t stop thinking about how silly she must look stretched out on the rug by her bed like a crazy person. What adult lies down on the floor? Tim had asked her this once when he caught her snoozing on the carpet in the apartment.
She went to the window and pulled back the curtain to see how windy it was. She was startled at the sight of someone moving in the semi-dark in the side yard, almost out of the porch light’s reach, until she realized it was Dean, heading for the trash barrels with a garbage bag. As she watched, he whipped the lid off—she could never get it off smoothly like that, how did he do it?—and dropped the bag in. He took a couple of steps back toward the house, into the light, and paused when he inadvertently kicked what she soon realized was a big pinecone.
He picked it up off the ground and seemed to weigh it in his hand. She saw him look around the yard, over at the driveway, and even—she thought—up at her window. She instinctively stepped back. He tossed the pinecone into the air and caught it. He turned his body, those big shoulders, to face the house, then pivoted his head until he was staring across the wide backyard. It took her a minute to realize what he was doing, and then she saw his leg kick up, his shoulders rotate, his arm whip around, the pinecone fly across the yard and smack into the fence. He stared for a minute after it, at the spot where it had landed, and then he rubbed his right shoulder. He walked slowly over to examine the spot where it had hit, touching the wooden fence like he could read the splinters with his fingers.
He leaned down and picked up the pinecone, and he walked back to where he’d been standing. He repeated the motion: settled his body, stretched, rotated, let it fly, listened to it smack into the wood. Up by the window, Evvie moved the curtain aside a little more and leaned down.
He picked it up again. He walked in a couple of small circles, resting his hands on his hips. He tossed the pinecone in his hand, just a few inches, and caught it. Finally, he set himself again. This time, when his shoulders rotated, he uncoiled his body with such force that he almost knocked himself over. And this time, when it hit the fence, she saw the pinecone break apart and hit the ground in pieces. He stood for a minute with his hands on his hips, then bent down to rest his hands on his knees, like he was out of breath. Finally, he came toward the house.
It wouldn’t be fair at all to spy on him and then run downstairs so she could pretend to coincidentally run into him as he came in. If she was curious about what he was doing out there, she would just ask. She would at least tell him she had been watching. Spying was bad. Being nosy was bad. These were all the things Evvie was thinking as she took the stairs two at a time, down to the kitchen, where she snatched the kettle off the stove so that she was filling it just as the side door opened. “Oh, hey, I didn’t know you were out there,” she said as he came in, still wiping his hands on his jeans. “I was making some tea. Can I make you some?”
“Oh,” he said to her. “Sure, thank you. How’s everything?”
How’s everything with you? What happened? Why can’t you pitch? How did you get the trash-can lid to come off like that?
“Everything’s good,” she said, plunking down in the kitchen chair. “How have you been settling in?”
“Can’t say I’ve done that much exploring. I should be getting out a little more.”
“I say that to myself a lot, believe me.” She fidgeted with the salt shaker. “And I’m sure the last few months in New York were hard, privacy-wise.”
“You could say that,” he said with a barely perceptible smile, or maybe a barely perceptible grimace—it really was…barely perceptible.
She listened to the clock. She wondered if he’d say something, but he didn’t. They sat there together, and nothing happened. The kettle started to make a noise like a long exhalation, and they still sat there. Her chest felt tight.
She put down the salt. “There was a memorial thing for Tim today,” she said. “They planted a tree.” She figured he had to be startled that she’d come right out with this. She certainly was.
“Oh, boy.” He leaned forward, but she didn’t immediately go on. “How did it go?” She knew they were breaking their deal, punching a little hole in the rowboat in which they’d decided to float. Just this once. You can always patch a hole.
“Well, a lot of people said a lot of things about how wonderful he was. So that was great for his mom and dad. He has lots of friends. Well, he had. One lady ripped off a poem from a TV show, so I think she might be disqualified from the Grief Olympics, but there was a patient he helped who had lots of good things to say.” She rubbed the back of her neck.
“How was it for you?”
She wrinkled her brow. “What do you mean?”
“You said it was great for his mom and dad, his friends. I’m asking how it was for you.”
Evvie licked her lips. “Um.” And she couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t. Now she was going to cry. Now, in her kitchen, while she was making tea, while she was talking to someone who was probably not ready to be promoted north of “acquaintance,” she was going to cry. She’d had to pray for wet eyes at the tree-planting, had to coax a lump into her throat while everyone else was sniffling away, and now this. She took a couple of deep breaths, trying to look like she was thinking about what to
say. Finally, she felt herself calm.
“I felt bad,” she said, “because they all loved him so much, and I didn’t. I mean, I loved him originally, a lot, but I didn’t when he died. He wasn’t nice to me. He didn’t hit me or anything, but he was sometimes pretty nasty. And then he died, and now when I’m around people who miss him, I don’t know what to do. Sometimes I can’t sleep because I don’t miss him so much, which sounds crazy. But…that. It’s that, that’s why I’m…” Her voice trailed off, and she waved a hand in front of her face. “Nobody knows all that, by the way. Not even Andy. So, if you don’t mind.” It had just tumbled right out. Not all of it, not the leaving, but more than she’d expected. It might have been sheer exhaustion, or the sight of him throwing at ghosts under her outside light.
Dean met her eyes. He nodded. “I’ve only done one thing seriously since I was ten, and I can’t do it anymore, and nobody can tell me why,” he said. “So I don’t know what to do either.” He ran his hand over his hair. “It’s not the same at all. I don’t mean to say it’s the same.”
“Honestly, I don’t know if it is. I don’t know…a lot.” She sighed. The kettle haaaaa-d louder and they sat. Finally, the hiss became a whistle. She got up, and as she passed him on her way to the cabinet, he reached out and grabbed her hand with one of his. He squeezed, then let go.
She pushed her hair behind her ear and moved the kettle off the burner, listening to the whistle fade. The quiet came up behind her. “Did I tell you about the time Andy and I won $100 with a scratch-off ticket?” she asked. “We spent every penny of it on Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.” She poured the tea and told the story, and they talked about the weather and the repairs his truck needed.
* * *
—
When the mugs were empty and he’d vanished into the apartment, she cleaned up the kitchen and went upstairs to her bedroom. She took her laptop down from the dresser, sat on her bed, and did something she had not done yet: she googled Dean. And she read everything. This was when she learned that what had happened to Dean was called “the yips”—although right now, they were also calling it Dean Tenney Disease.