by Linda Holmes
“I understand that, but I don’t want to talk about it with you.”
“Eveleth,” Eileen said. “You only have one mom, and I only have one daughter. And I don’t want either of us to have any regrets.” There it was. The crescendo of Eileen Ashton’s symphony for telephone and preprinted greeting card always ended here, with the same cymbal crash: But how will you feel if I die?
“Mom, I’ll talk to you later.”
“Evvie, it’s not like you to be like this.”
“No,” Evvie said. “I know it’s not.”
“EVELETH,” SAID DR. JANE TALCO with a smile as she swung open the door of her office. “Come on in. It’s good to see you again. Pardon my stacks of paperwork.”
Evvie stepped into the room, beige and blue and calming, feeling her heart pound so fast she thought she might pass out. She lowered herself onto the couch and tried to smile a mentally healthy smile, whatever that was. “It’s good to see you, too,” she finally said, as evenly as she could, which was ridiculous, because it wasn’t good at all.
“So,” Dr. Talco said, settling into her wing chair. “It’s been a while. Tell me what’s going on.”
The surprising thing to Evvie was not that she cried, since she’d been doing that on and off for the last four days, but that she cried so soon. “Shit,” she whispered to herself.
“There are tissues on the table. Take a breath.”
Evvie dabbed at her eyes, managed a long exhale, and then focused her eyes on a painting of gulls on the wall behind the doctor’s chair. “I feel like I’m already bad at this.”
“You’re doing fine,” Dr. Talco told her.
“What, crying as soon as I sit down?”
“I’ve had people cry for six months,” the doctor said. Evvie felt her eyes widen a little. “I’m not saying you will.”
“I don’t know what to say,” Evvie told her. “I guess ‘help.’ But I don’t know what else.”
“Well, what made you pick up the phone and call me?” Dr. Talco was holding a silver pen, rolling it a little between her fingers.
“I dropped something. In my kitchen. And I don’t know what happened, I just…flipped out. I guess I thought I might be going crazy. Or whatever is less offensive than that.” She explained about the rice and the can and hearing herself wail. It sounded as strange when she described it as it had felt when it happened. If her head really was the house she lived in, Evvie was increasingly afraid that walking through it and stomping on the floorboards, rattling the beams, might make it all collapse right down to the concrete slab. “I ended up screaming on the floor of my kitchen over having to clean up some stuff I spilled. And like I said, it made me think I might be crazy. It just didn’t seem normal.”
“I don’t know about that,” Dr. Talco told her. “When we talked last time, I told you that I thought in your situation, most people would need some help. Remind me how long ago your husband died?”
“Almost two years.” She shook her head. “Yeah, wow, in a couple of weeks, it’ll be two years,” Evvie said. She instantly felt fraudulent, letting this doctor treat her like she might be grieving. “I also just ended a relationship I was maybe getting into. And I might have broken up with my mother, too. I’m not sure my husband’s accident is what’s wrong.”
“You know, nothing’s necessarily wrong.”
“You didn’t see me on the floor of my kitchen.”
Dr. Talco smiled. “You would be shocked how many people tell me that they got through cancer or divorce or having their house burn down, but then they lost their keys or they ran out of coffee or the dog chewed on a slipper, and they fell to pieces. It’s just that last insult.”
“I feel…” This was all Evvie said for a while. She said, I feel, and she stopped. She looked out the window and at the floor, and she kept expecting Dr. Talco to take over. She expected her to lead. It went beyond an awkward silence until it was a cooperative silence. One with intent. Evvie finally cleared her throat into her fist. “I feel like I should be able to figure this out. I keep telling myself, you know? Pull it together. You’re not starving, and you have friends, and just…get a grip.”
Dr. Talco tapped her index fingers together. “Did you know it’s possible to remove your own teeth with pliers?”
Evvie looked at her blankly. “That’s not what I thought you were going to say.”
“No, no, probably not. But it’s true. If you have a bad tooth, you can take a pair of pliers, stick them in there, and pull as hard as you can. Is that something you would do?”
“This feels like a trick question.”
“Stay with it.”
“No, I don’t think I would pull out my own tooth with pliers.”
“That’s what I always tell people about therapy. It’s not a question of whether you could try to do it by yourself. You can always try it. But it can be dangerous, and it’s harder. Trying to buck yourself up is the tooth pliers of mental health.”
She remembered Monica saying Mental health metaphors are a mixed bag, and it made her smile. She sort of bought this one.
“Evvie, if it helps you to hear it, given everything you’ve said in the last five minutes, this is a whole lot to tackle alone.”
“So you think I’m a candidate for therapy.”
“Oh, practically everyone’s a candidate for therapy. Myself included. The question is, do you want to give it a try? Do you want to talk about you?”
Evvie nodded. “Yeah.”
* * *
—
Evvie put the Bancroft house on the market. It sold fast once she let her realtor sweep in and remove half of what was in it, making it look even bigger, even emptier. They replaced the living room rug, meaning whatever remained of the spots of her blood from the glass that Tim broke went out the front door. One last time, she lay on the floor in the apartment, pushing her palms into the floor, missing Dean so much that she felt dizzy. And then she packed, and she left, and she lived with her dad for a couple of months and looked for a new place.
She picked it out on a chilly fall day when she’d just taken her heavier jacket out of storage. Betsey, her real estate agent, brought Evvie in her boxy little red car across the short bridge from Calcasset to Kettle Bay Island, sometimes shorthanded as KBI. The island was mostly little cottages with one or two bedrooms, some of them were rented out in the summer. “I think you might like this one,” Betsey said. “I thought of you as soon as I saw it. It’s not big, but it looks right out at the water.”
It was a house with a name—Kettlewood, they called it. When Evvie opened the door, she saw a woodstove in the corner and the kind of cheap and durable carpeting that was common in rental houses, with a worn path from the kitchen to the living room and then out to the sitting room facing the harbor. Most of the water side of the house was picture windows, and then there was a small deck, big enough for a couple of lounge chairs and maybe a charcoal grill. The kitchen was small, and she’d have to replace the appliances. But it turned out the furnace was sound, the roof passed muster, and when her father came and walked around, he said, “Yuh. Looks like a good one, Eveleth.”
* * *
—
Before she finished emptying the Bancroft house, Evvie had invited Tim’s mom, Lila, to have a look around and see if there was anything that she’d like to take as a keepsake. Lila wandered around the house, and Evvie knew she was staring at all the places Tim had stood, sat, or held court about medicine. Whatever else he had been, Tim had been hers. “Sometimes I still can’t believe it,” Lila said. “It’s so sad.”
Evvie didn’t even know which sad thing she meant. So much was sad. Everything was sad here. Sadness lived in the walls like a poltergeist, and it was time to run. When Lila left an hour later, after a cup of coffee and a chat about the scholarship at the school in Tim’s honor and the work Evvie had to do a
t Kettlewood, she said, “I hope you’re as happy in the new place as you were here.” It didn’t even feel like lying when Evvie hugged Lila again and pretended to want the same. It felt like dropping a gift into her pocket, passing a talisman to someone for whom it could do some good. It was just giving Lila back Tim’s death to grieve as she would, like she’d given his shirts to Goodwill. And like she’d finally made a fire in the fireplace and burned her box of receipts and ticket stubs and his flash cards from college.
* * *
—
While she waited to move, she called Nona and managed to catch her between classes.
“Nona, it’s Evvie Drake. I’m so sorry it’s been such a long time. I’ve had a lot going on. I should have called.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear from you,” Nona told her. “I was about to give up and call somebody who’s not nearly as good as you are.” They did not talk about condolences or regrets. They didn’t talk about Tim, because Nona didn’t know him, and she didn’t care. They didn’t talk about Dean, because she didn’t follow baseball. She knew only Evvie. She knew only Evvie’s work. Not family, not good deeds, not the broken-legged birds she might have saved. Just her work.
They agreed to collaborate on a book examining the effects of industrial fishing operations and climate change on the lobstermen of Maine. The work would start in April. Nona sent her a new voice recorder and a bottle of champagne with a note that said, “We’re going to do great work together. Thank you.” Andy took her to dinner to celebrate.
* * *
—
At Thanksgiving, her father carved the turkey, and when he told everyone what he was thankful for, he said that he was thankful for his daughter, “and everything she does every day to make me so proud, even though she lost so much.” It was a start. Maybe someday, she’d tell him more, about the blue suitcase and the bruise on her back. But Dr. Talco had assured her that she shouldn’t unless she wanted to. “You have nothing to confess,” she’d said.
* * *
—
For Christmas, Andy and Monica gave her a gift certificate for a spa day at a resort in Bar Harbor. When she opened it at their house on Christmas morning, Monica leaned toward her and said, “We’re going together, if that’s okay.” Evvie nodded. When they got their massages in January, Evvie breathed deeply and blissfully while a woman spread a hot clay mask across her back and shoulders. But when the woman moved a bit of her hair out of the way to keep it clean, Evvie gasped, struck by a sense memory of Dean nudging her hair off the back of her neck with his fingers. Her eyes stung.
* * *
—
In February, Evvie moved into Kettlewood, and a week later, she went to Thunderous A-Paws, a dog rescue in Thomaston that Diane Marsten had recommended to her. Evvie stepped up to the desk and said, “Hi. I think my new house needs a dog.” The woman at the desk grinned at her.
Back in what they called their “dormitory,” she went into a small room where a brown puppy with big feet was dragging around a plush baseball as big as his head. She laughed out loud and bent down close to him. “Oh, hi, buddy.” The pup kept the ball in his mouth as he made his way over to her. Without letting go, he looked directly into her eyes and said, Rrr?
Evvie sat on the floor. The puppy dropped the baseball and devoted himself fully to what seemed to be an effort to touch every part of her with his nose before leaping into her chest through her rib cage. She kept talking to him, feeling his soft coat under her fingers, laughing when he tried to crawl up onto her bent knees and landed in a heap on his side, still wagging his entire back end.
Four days and a home visit later, she was lying on the floor of her new house with a puppy stretched out on her chest while she skritched his ears and watched his sleepy, moony eyes droop shut.
* * *
—
Evvie had been in her house for a few weeks when she decided it was as good a night as any to hook up the speakers she’d bought used from a friend of Andy’s. The system was all wireless, with a long sound bar in the living room and smaller ones for the kitchen and the bedroom. She connected it all to her phone, and as soon as she pressed play, she jumped. The dog jumped, and his ears stood up like a kangaroo’s. It was so loud. She started to reach for the volume, but she stopped, amused by the feeling of her feet, in socks, buzzing with vibrations in the floor.
The nearest neighbor wasn’t close. There was no one trying to sleep upstairs, or trying to make a phone call, or trying to get work done. So she stood for a minute, and she let the soles of her feet thrum. She walked over to the wall and laid her hand against it, and she felt it there, too, and she laughed. “Holy shit.” There were sounds that felt thick and round under her palm and ones that felt sharp and thin. She walked over to the window and leaned close to it, and where the lights were reflected, she could see the glass shaking just a little. She laid her flat hand against the cool pane and when the bass pounded, it tickled her skin. When she moved away, she could see her greasy handprint, like a high five from a ghost. It was, she suddenly knew, her window to smudge.
She started to bounce on the balls of her feet with what now seemed to be the pulse of the whole house. Webster was beginning to gather that this was playtime, so he came over next to her and crouched down with his butt in the air. “Puppy dance!” Evvie said to him, and she did the twist for her little brown dog as he beat his tail against the ground and then offered a yip. She shimmied and ponied over to the kitchen, where she soloed on an imaginary piano, skimming her fingers across her beat-up laminate countertop.
She spun down the hallway from the kitchen to the bedroom, and she dropped onto her back on the bed, feet wiggling, hands waving, screaming out the last chorus. As she finished holding the final note with her eyes shut, she felt a damp nose nuzzle her forehead. She emerged from her reverie to find Webster trying to climb onto her chest.
Evvie sat up and scratched the dog’s ears. Her face was hot and sticky, she was entirely out of breath, and she owed nothing to anyone.
DEAN STOOD IN HIS PARENTS’ study and stared at his Little League trophies, some framed articles about his career—the good parts—and a variety of Marlins and Yankees swag. It was March, and he wasn’t getting ready for a season, and it still made his shoulder itch. He’d figured the visit would do him good.
“I’m about to put dinner on the table,” his mom said, putting her arm around his waist.
He draped his around her shoulders. “You guys don’t have to keep all this stuff, you know.”
“You don’t think we should at least hang on to your bobblehead?” She reached out and touched it, and it nodded enthusiastically.
“Man, I thought that was cool when they made that,” he said, smiling. “My own bobblehead. Might have been the pinnacle of my career.”
“Not the SVU cameo?” she asked. “You did meet Ice-T.”
“I did,” he said, and then he put his fingers on his own little image to still it. “Okay, you can keep that. But you could probably lose a lot of the rest of this stuff.”
“Are you kidding? I still come in here to try on the big foam hand with the ‘we’re number one’ finger. I wear it during fights with your dad.”
“You do not.”
“I could.”
“You know, there’s not a lot to be proud of anymore, Mom.”
She knocked his hip with hers. “Of course we’re proud. You were always going to stop playing at some point. You were always going to get old, if nothing else. You’ve got some gray in your hair, you know.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.”
“Your dad put on your jersey every time you pitched. We were in the car one time when you struck out the side and he honked the horn until I thought he was going to get a ticket.”
Dean looked at the Daily News headline that called him a hero. “I was a pretty good pitcher,” he said to
his mother.
“You were a great pitcher. You remember that?” She pointed to a picture cut out of The New York Times where they’d caught him in midair after a World Series win. He had leapt a couple of feet with his legs splayed like a hurdler’s, his mouth open in a holler, his fists over his head. The photo had been on T-shirts and magazine covers, and he’d seen two different pictures of people who’d had it tattooed on their arms. “You still did that,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said. “I did. It’s just…I’m the only one, you know? I’m the only one who knows I did every…everything I could think of, everything they told me to do. I’m going to spend the rest of my life hearing from people who think I didn’t care enough.”
Angie slowly rubbed his back. “Dean, people don’t like…fragility. It makes them nervous. They’re scared thinking things just happen. They think there’s always something you can do to keep monsters from getting under the bed. Do you know what I mean?”
“You’re saying judgmental bastards feel invincible.”
She shrugged. “I didn’t say it was going to make you feel better. But what should make you feel better is that you get to keep every good day you had playing.” She put her hand on his elbow. “And whether you ever pick up another baseball as long as you live, we’re not going to be any less proud of you than we were when they took that picture.” She looked at her watch. “Now, I’m going to serve dinner in about five minutes. Don’t make me come back and drag you out.”
“I’ll be there,” he said, leaning down to kiss her on the cheek. “Thank you, Mom.”
* * *
—