by Linda Holmes
She paused. “What do they do if your bones aren’t still attached?”
“They do surgery. They use a tendon from your leg and tie your arm bones together.”
“You’re lying.”
“I am not lying. If that doesn’t work, they use part of a dead body.”
“They do not.”
“They absolutely do. They do it on teenagers.”
“Wait, how do you tie a bone to something?”
“They drill a hole in it and loop it through.”
“Oh my God.”
“Oh, it’s disgusting.” He rubbed his elbow just thinking about it. “You ever broken a bone?”
“When I was eight, I jumped off a picnic table and broke my arm.”
“Why did you jump off a picnic table?”
She turned her head toward him. “Because John Cody said I was afraid to jump off the picnic table.”
“Your badass phase.”
“Indeed.”
“When I was fifteen, I broke my collarbone skiing,” he said, pointing to it. “My dad was so pissed. ‘You’re supposed to be going to college for baseball, and you’re going around with these idiots and hot-dogging.’ I hadn’t told him we were going. I wasn’t supposed to go. I went anyway.”
“What did he do?”
Dean laughed. “Nothing. He didn’t want me to let my knucklehead buddies toss me off a mountain in a hang glider. I come home in a bucket and he can’t send me to college. And he wanted me to go to college.”
“What did you do in college besides play ball?”
“I was a chemistry major.”
She turned to look at him. “You’re kidding.”
“Oh, I get it. You thought I took bullshit classes? Just a lot of Running Laps 101 and How to Tape Your Ankles?”
“No, of course not. I didn’t know.” She stared at the ceiling. “What did you like about chemistry?” she asked.
“I got to do things,” he said. “You mix this with that, and if you know how it works, you can make it turn blue or heat up or blow up. It was crazy shit, but it was predictable crazy shit. You could make something give off green smoke or turn into foam, but it did it the same way every time. And then you record it, and boom, that’s your result. It’s the same thing with baseball. It looks crazy, but it’s all physics. It feels like there’s no logic, but there is. I mean, except when there isn’t, obviously.”
She turned on her side and sat up on her elbow. She reached out with her ring finger and ran it along his brow bone. “What’s the scar here?”
“Ball to the face junior year at Cornell,” he said. “Blood pouring down. Just pouring. Remember the normal people I said I dated? I had a girlfriend then, Tracy, who was at the game, and she fainted. Just, boom, like that. I felt so bad. From what I heard, she took one look at me and she slithered right down in her seat like in a Daffy Duck cartoon. Her friend revived her with a face full of ice and Diet Coke.”
“Oof, that’s a hard way to wake up.”
“Then they took me to the hospital and glued my face back together.”
“You didn’t have stitches?”
“No, glue. When I called home and told my mother I got taken to the ER and fixed up with glue, she hung up and called the hospital. My dad says it was all ‘You glued my child together,’ ‘This isn’t an arts and crafts project,’ stuff like that. But then they told her that it wasn’t glue, that it was called artificial skin. And she’s just ‘Oh, okay.’ ” He pantomimed hanging up the phone.
“Is it really called artificial skin?” she asked.
“No idea. She felt better, though. Have you ever had stitches?”
“Once in my knee, and then once a couple years ago when I stepped on a broken glass in the living room.”
“Ouch.”
“Bled all over the place. It was really gross.”
“I bet.”
Almost without realizing she was doing it, Evvie used her toe to feel the scar on her other foot where the ER had stitched her up. It had been Tim’s broken glass. He’d been angry. But she’d told the nurse she broke the glass in the kitchen. “Slipped right out of my hand,” she’d said.
She trailed her finger down from Dean’s temple to his jaw and jumped at a deep red mark above his collarbone. “Oh, damn, I think I got you right here. You have a bruise.”
He sat up in bed until he could see himself in the mirror over the dresser, and he tipped his head to the side. “That’s not a bruise,” he said, feeling it with his fingers. He turned to her and lowered his chin until he was looking at her through his impressive eyelashes. “You gave me a hickey.” He repeated it. “You gave me a hickey.”
She squinted at it. “Wait, when did I do that?” And then she remembered. “Ohhhh, I did do that.” She smiled and gritted her teeth. “Sorry?”
“Don’t be sorry. Shit, this is almost enough for me to get on Instagram. I’ll just write, ‘Having fun up here in Maine.’ Then put up the picture—ka-pow!” He reached for his phone. “I’m taking a selfie.”
“You are not.” Laughing, she reached for it, too, but she was hopelessly overmatched by his considerable wingspan, and she wound up lying on top of him, inches from his scruffy face, as he held the phone out of reach. “It doesn’t hurt,” she whispered, “does it?”
“No,” he whispered back, smiling. “It doesn’t hurt.”
LATER, AS DEAN’S TRUCK BUMPED along Route 1, they passed a billboard for the Compass Café that had been there for ages, at least since Evvie was a teenager. “I wonder if the Compass is going broke now that you guys don’t sit around for six hours every weekend,” Dean said.
“It wasn’t six hours.” Evvie kept looking out the window. “Maybe two.”
“Are you ever going to tell me what that’s all about?” he asked.
Evvie looked over at him, the way his once-disobedient arm rested on the wheel. What was broken could be fixed, and she took a breath. “So, the night that my husband died…” She paused and took a deep breath. “I was leaving him. Like, I wasn’t thinking about leaving him. I was in the process of leaving him.”
Dean was still. “How close were you?”
Now she looked back out the window. “I was standing in the driveway when they called me. I’d packed one suitcase, and some money, and my birth certificate.”
“But you hadn’t told Tim?”
“He would have argued. I wouldn’t have left. And the next day, he would have been sorry.”
“Of course.”
“Anyway, Andy’s mom saw the suitcase in my car at the hospital. She mentioned it to Andy. He figured it out. He was upset.”
Dean frowned. “But he wasn’t upset that you were leaving.”
“No. I think he was upset that I was going to leave without telling him. Without telling anybody. Upset is the wrong word. Hurt, maybe.”
“Why didn’t you tell anybody?”
“Because I wouldn’t have left then, either.”
“You really know how to hold your cards close.”
“I promised Tim I wouldn’t talk about marriage things with Andy. Which seemed reasonable enough.”
“When did you decide to go?”
“Oh,” Evvie said. “Well, there was this night when he said he was going to bring pizza home for dinner, but when he got home, he didn’t have it. I say, ‘What happened to bringing pizza home?’ And he says, ‘I never said that.’ It was so…so bizarre, the idea that I would have imagined an entire exchange with him where he told me he was going to pick up pizza for dinner on the way home. I remembered specifically that he said he was going to get pepperoni and mushrooms, because I don’t like mushrooms, and I’d decided to pick them off. I remembered. And I told him, ‘Why are you trying to act like I’m crazy instead of saying you forgot to pick up dinner? Who even
cares?’ ”
“What did he say?”
“He said, ‘I just spent ten hours taking care of sick people while you sat at home doing nothing. I’m not your delivery service.’ I walked away. Before you lived in your apartment, it was sort of where I went to get away from Tim. So, I go there, and I lie on the floor, and of course I’m starving, because I waited for him, and there’s no pizza. And I start thinking maybe I’ll run out and grab something to eat. And then I think maybe I’ll take a drive. And then I think maybe I’ll stay overnight at this nice place in Rockport. Just stay away for a night, watch TV, be by myself, call it a spa night, or maybe fib and tell him I had to go stay with my dad because his hip was acting up or something.”
“Did you do it?”
“Nope. I went out and I got pizza, and I brought it back at ten thirty at night. Mushrooms and everything. Argument over. But practically every day after that, I’d go back in and I’d lie on the floor and I’d add something to this story I was writing in my head. I wasn’t going to do it. It was just this idea. What if I stayed away a weekend, where would I go? Did I have enough money to go to Boston for a week? What would I need? What would I take? How long could I go? And I don’t even know what he had said to me, but there was some night when I was lying in there listening to the ceiling fan rattling, and I thought, ‘What if I left and I never came back?’ And that’s when I started having these fantasies about where I would go, that I’d go live in the mountains. I’d have some little cabin, and I’d have a dog, and I’d have a job. I had these fantasies where I turned into a new person nothing had ever happened to.”
“Like the ‘I Married an Asshole’ division of the Witness Protection Program.”
“Yes! That’s exactly what it was. And every time I thought about what my dad would do if I left, or what Andy would do, I shoved it out of my mind. I thought about making dinner or doing my hair or painting a wall without anybody telling me I didn’t know what I was doing.”
“And then what?”
“I went on like that for months. But then one night when he was out, I took a pack of playing cards—I sometimes play real solitaire with real cards—and I put them into this backpack that I had. And that was it. That was the beginning of packing. It was real, and I was doing it.”
“And you didn’t talk to anybody.”
“I still felt like I was rehearsing it, to see if I wanted to do it. I still felt like I’d choke at the end. I figured I wouldn’t go through with it.”
“But then you did.”
“Yeah.” She chuckled a little. “Well, I started packing the car, at least.” Evvie briefly put her hand over her eyes. “I sort of had a target date. And then a few days before he died, I told him it bugged me that—well, we’d made this trip to Bangor to have dinner with a couple doctors he knew. And when they asked what I did, he’d said, ‘She makes me happy.’ I told him, ‘They wanted to know what I do. You should have told them I work. You should have told them I work with journalists, I have a business,’ all that. And he said, ‘I was trying to protect your feelings. I didn’t know how you’d feel if I told a bunch of doctors you were a typist for somebody’s book about trees.’ ”
Dean’s mouth went slack.
“The day came, and I packed the car. Maybe I would have gone. Maybe I would have chickened out, I guess.”
“You would’ve gone.”
“I hope so,” she said, and even though she knew she was imagining it, it felt like the sound of those words bounced around the truck. “I keep having plans. I thought I was going to marry this guy and be happy and be done with everything that was hard by the time I was twenty-five. And then I thought I was going to pack all my stuff and get in my car and get a divorce. Go back to my maiden name and get a job and live in some little house in the mountains, and it’s just…nothing turned out.”
“Well, that part sounds familiar to me.”
“Now I’m on Evvie Drake, take three.”
“You think you’ll ever change your name back?”
“I can’t, really.”
“Of course you can,” he said, frowning.
She raised her eyebrows. “Give back the name of my husband who’s going to wind up with a wing at the clinic named after him if his mother has anything to say about it? Tell his parents I don’t want it anymore? I don’t think that would go over very well.”
“So you’re going to drag around his name for the next fifty years so nobody gets their feelings hurt?”
“Eh. Maybe. I don’t know.” Evvie’s fingers went reflexively to her pocket, to the ridge where her rings pushed up against the fabric from inside. “It’s only the first day.”
“Of what?” he asked.
“You know,” she said. “Whatever.”
IN EARLY JUNE, EVVIE WAS putting off making dinner and reading a diary from a 1912 textile strike in Massachusetts when she heard Dean’s truck pull into the driveway. She kept the book open and kept her eyes pointed straight at it, but really, she waited to hear his key in the door. She knew how long it should take, the way you know how long someone who goes underwater should take to come to the surface, and when she didn’t hear anything, she went to the window and looked out. He was sitting in the truck, both hands on the wheel. She watched him sit very still until she felt more self-conscious watching than she would barging in on his reverie, and she finally stepped out the door into the dry, warm early summer.
Coming up to the truck, she tried not to wonder what was wrong. Someone died. Someone called. He met someone else. He’s leaving. Whatever it was, I broke it. As she came up to the window, he looked over and saw her, and he motioned for her to come around the other side. When she slid into the front seat next to him, she could see that his face wasn’t in a state of traumatized paralysis. It was in a state, instead, of uncomplicated disbelief. “What’s going on?” she asked, pulling the passenger door shut.
“Do you remember I told you about my buddy Dante, who was so jealous that I had the pinball machine?”
“With the two girlfriends?”
“Yeah.”
“Sure.”
“He texted me today, right before I left school.”
Dante played for the Phillies now, she was pretty sure. Or the Nationals. Their uniforms were similar. “What did he say?”
Dean kept his voice even. “Well, their pitching coach is Alex Laramie, who used to be with the Yankees. And Dante said that Alex saw the tape of me at the Spring Dance and I should call him.” Finally, Dean looked over at her.
“And?”
He looked straight ahead. His hands hadn’t come off the steering wheel. “And so I called Alex. He wants me to come down to a facility they have in Connecticut. They’ve had a couple of injuries, they’re feeling a little desperate, and he’s trying to figure out if there’s anything to, you know, pursue. With me.”
“You mean he wants to know whether you can pitch. He wants to give you a chance to pitch. Major league baseball. To major league baseball players.”
“Evvie, it’s just to see. He wants to see how I look, bring some of the other coaches, see what the situation is.”
“I know what the situation is,” she said, poking him in the side. “The situation is that you’re going to pitch again. Which, I want to point out, I always knew you would.”
“You did, huh.” He finally took his hands off the wheel and put them on the back of his head. “That’s interesting, because I’m fuckin’ shocked.”
“You should have more faith. Like I do.”
He reached one hand over and put it on the back of her neck, under her hair. He kissed her a little, then pulled away and said, “Wait. I don’t have to make out with you in the car. I’m not sixteen. I can make out with you in the house.”
“You can,” she said. “That’s very true.” Even in the car, she managed a sas
sy hand on the hip. “Do you want to see my room? It’s got all my cool posters and Trapper Keepers and stuff.”
“Of course.”
They got out of the truck and met up again by his door, closest to the house, where she kissed him again. Here were the irregular gray paving stones that Tim had picked out during their landscaping project after he told her the terra-cotta bricks looked “ordinary.” Here were the steps he’d rebuilt with a buddy in the crushing heat of summer while he was going through a “handy” phase, which lasted as long as it took for him to realize he was too accustomed to being good at everything to start over as a novice who couldn’t make a corner perfectly square.
Here was the front door she had opened, laughing, while being carried into the house on the day of the closing. Then the wood floor she’d once scratched with her suitcase wheel, for which he called her “so damn careless.” Here was the wide doorway into the kitchen, where on one occasion Tim had kissed her with unexpected urgency, pushing his hand under her shirt while she tried to scratch his shoulder enough to prove she, too, was trying. Here was the kitchen table where they’d agreed that they’d just have a baby if they had a baby, and they wouldn’t try one way or the other, which was a terrible lie since a doctor would know what it meant when, from time to time, she’d say, “Rain check?” Here was the sink where she had once put a rose down the garbage disposal—given too late for a birthday Tim forgot, which he’d made up for the next day by having six dozen fresh roses delivered to the house.
Here were the stairs where she had slipped two weeks before Tim died and put a big bruise on her hip. She fell; she wasn’t pushed. She wasn’t hit, she wasn’t punched. But she was hurrying down the stairs in her socks on the way to her hideout only because she was so tired of listening to him yell, so, as she said only to herself, you tell me.
And in the bedroom, here was the dresser that had carefully been coaxed through the door. It would later play a central role in the first of the fights she was sure would be their worst until another proved her wrong.