Evie of the Deepthorn

by André Babyn

  But how do you learn about life and death when you’re just a teenager sitting alone in your room? I’d never lived in a kingdom ravaged by an ice queen.

  I’d never lost a parent, let alone two.

  The only person I even remembered dying was Grandma Irene, when I was seven, but she lived in Alberta and I only remembered meeting her once, when I was too young to remember much about her.

  She wasn’t even my real grandma.

  I was afraid that the emotional reactions in Evie of the Deepthorn made no sense at all. That they were totally fake and would seem made up. That their emptiness would reveal the limits of my experience. Which wasn’t a problem just limited to my book. One of the things that Jess always said about me was that I was too quiet and never talked about anything important, like normal people do. That I never expressed anything without prompting. Once she even told me that she and Tiff felt like I was a kind of spy — though Tiff never said that to my face, I still had reason to believe it. Not a spy in the sense that I was going to betray their secrets, but like I was taking them for my own. Like I was a person made of clay, reaching into them and pulling out whatever I found. Sticking it onto me. Like I was a dark shadow roaming the countryside and gobbling people up.

  It was true that I felt that hungry, sometimes, waking up from my dreams.

  “You’re like a couch cushion,” Jess told me once. By which I think she meant, you are quiet, you gather up everything that is loose, sometimes you get sat on. I must have looked sad, because then she added, “I think that and then sometimes you make me laugh.”

  It didn’t make me feel much better.

  A kid from my school had died the year before, but I’d never even seen him around before. I can’t remember how it happened — some kind of accident, I think. He was a few grades above mine. I’d seen his younger brother, though. He was in my year. A skinny kid who sometimes made jokes in class — witty little jokes that didn’t hurt anybody. He was pretty well-liked, I think. For a few months he walked around the hallways with a dazed look in his eyes, and everyone got out of his way. Then the crowds closed in around him and everyone forgot what had happened. Or it didn’t matter anymore.

  I wanted to know some of what he did, except I didn’t want to actually know what it was like to lose someone I cared that much about, because I didn’t want that to happen to me. I didn’t even want to go outside. I tried to imagine what it was like for the younger brother to walk those hallways alone, missing the one person he probably cared about most. Knowing that everyone else knew. Feeling exposed.

  I think that would be the worst part, I don’t know why. It’s bad enough having everyone assume they know things about you just based on how you look. I hate it when people look at me and see how ugly I am and imagine that I don’t have feelings, like I am without personality, like I am an empty husk, like nothing will ever happen of any value in my life just because I’m quiet and my face is covered in pimples, or the ghosts of them. It gets on my nerves being so overlooked, to see eyes pass over me like I am a fly or a distant lake. To assume that I have nothing to say, even when I’m saying it.

  But then they sometimes stop and look at me, really look at me, up and down, like I’m behind one-way glass. Like they know the whole course of my life — beginning to end. Like all of my defects are theirs to discover. Like my body belongs to them. Like I’m not even there. And I don’t like that either.

  I would hate it if they knew something real. Or if they thought they did. I can’t decide which is worse. For that reason I decided it was wrong to think so hard about what that kid might feel about his brother dying, that maybe it was a kind of exploitation, or violence, or something bad, and so I stopped.

  * * *

  Is there a way to access pain without getting hurt yourself? Should I be happier that the hurt I feel — dull, aching, confused — can’t be connected to any one thing? Or is it worse that what I feel seems sort of never-ending? Inherent, endless, like how Evie’s quest to defeat Llor feels to me right now? She’s still in the forest, still being pummelled by the rain, because I can’t figure out where I want to get her to go next. Because I haven’t been able to sit down and concentrate since that last rainstorm. Whenever I take out the notebook and open it to the last page I was working on, I pick up the pen and press it to the paper, sit there staring down from my window, at the street where cars are slowly moving back and forth in front of the house, where the grass — still long and glittering — waves gently in the breeze, trying to think of what happens next. And nothing comes out.

  Sometimes when I get stuck I go downstairs and bring one of my dad’s Renaissance magazines up to my room, and leaf through it until I find something that gives me an idea. Once it was a detailed article on how to build an accurate thirteenth-century blacksmith’s forge in your backyard. Another time it was a photo series of knights standing in front of tents set up in a green field, knights who were knights like my dad was a knight, actually middle managers or software engineers, balding men who sat in cubicles and drove Toyota Camrys and drank Diet Cokes. But for some reason I didn’t think it would be enough to look through one of those magazines. I didn’t think I’d learn anything. I thought leafing through pictures and articles featuring the sad men and women who spent their weekends and evenings sewing costumes and handcrafting weapons and imagining themselves galloping at top speed across a plain free of modern responsibility would be depressing. I mean, it was depressing most days, probably, to most people. But it also wouldn’t teach me anything I actually wanted to learn. Those people in the magazines were just as stuck as Evie was, except for them there’s no triumph on the other side, just the sad realization that must grow with every year, that no matter how close they get to the time they love, they will never quite reach what they are looking for.

  I’d like to disappear with them, too, of course — or anywhere, a part of me wants that — but I know I can’t. I’ve never been able to fully disappear, as much as I would like to. As much as I want to imagine myself walking through a forest alone, armed only with a knife or a spear and fending for myself, I know that is a hard and dangerous freedom to seek. And not really what I want, either. They never talk about that in my dad’s magazines — what a pain it must have been to find food, shelter, places to go to the bathroom. How terrible everyone must have smelled. Ironically, it’s a scrubbed-clean reality that they are escaping to, something from movies or books. Something without habit or routine, which is exactly what gets cut out of those narratives. That’s why I think it’s only in fiction where real triumph can be found.

  When I was a little kid my dad would take me to the fairgrounds outside Saffronville, where maybe two or three times a summer they would stage a medieval fair. I’d dress up like a princess in an old Halloween costume and he would wear one of his chain-mail pieces and sometimes an open helmet, and he’d release the ponytail he normally wore, letting his hair fall to his shoulders, and we’d split a turkey leg and drink warm root beer and browse the shops staffed by too-affable men and women in period costume and watch men charge at one another on horseback and sword-fight with big, exaggerated blows. And I liked to do all of that, but I was always looking for something else, I think. I wanted both to believe it all and to catch them out, to escape into the fantasy, but also to destroy the illusion. That latter thing wasn’t hard to do — there was always the odd thrumming generator, pair of Adidas sneakers, plastic ketchup bottle, truck parked behind a tent. They weren’t trying to remake the entire world, just transform a little piece of it.

  When I was really little I was always pointing this or that inaccuracy out to my dad. When I got older I wore a constant look of skepticism which I think convinced him that I had outgrown the fairs, and he stopped taking me and started going on his own. But it wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy them anymore, because I did; it was only that I couldn’t let myself give in to them, because I knew somehow that I could have and I didn’t want to turn into one of the men or women
staffing the booths.

  It was exactly like Jess said — I liked to take a look, but I didn’t want to go any further. I was a tourist.

  I didn’t want it to be true, but it was true.

  Sometimes, when Mom and Dad are asleep, I sneak downstairs and into the backyard, lie out on the back deck, close my eyes, and think about things with the breeze gently rolling over me and the sound of the trees and birds and bats rustling in the night, but never fall asleep, not even when I’m totally relaxed, or at least I think I don’t. Or else instead of closing my eyes, I stare straight up into the night sky, where you can’t see anything, really, but the moon and sometimes clouds and maybe a few twinkling stars or distant satellites — when I was little and Durham was smaller you could see a lot more, even the purply ribbons of the Milky Way — and think about what all of that darkness means and how it is up there but in me, too, and how I don’t understand it at all and I feel deeply broken at every moment. Sometimes it seems like a shadow is chasing me, a shadow that I can’t comprehend or understand, and I want to be good or to feel in control of myself, but that is always just out of my reach, or maybe not just out of my reach but actually on another planet, like I am on earth and it is on the moon, or it is on the moon and I am on the moon, too, but I am far away, like I am somewhere on the dark side and I’ll never see the light.

  Then I wish I could put on a costume or clutch a good facsimile of a sword and thrust my way through life and, just like my dad, find some solace or comfort in something small and meaningless, something that despite all of that I could nevertheless believe in. But I know that I could never believe in anything — not for very long, in any case.

  2

  In a little alcove by the washer and dryer downstairs, in what my dad called his “hobby corner” (even though I mostly tried to be sensitive with him I did sometimes make fun of him for calling it that), was where my dad kept his suits of armour. They were, of course, just reproductions, but impressive, even though you could tell just from a glance that they weren’t authentic. When I was five or six he spent most of his evenings in front of the TV, on the couch, looping together a chain-mail chest protector that was one of his most treasured pieces, even though he rarely wore it out. That was due to a tear in the back, near the left shoulder, where some of the loops had started to come undone. He’d made it too heavy on that side, was how he explained it to me, and one of these days he’d find the time to fix it, but he hadn’t yet. I think it was more work than he was ready for; probably when he thought back to how long it took him to assemble in the first place, the task seemed humongous and deflating. There was a lot that was like that around the house, a lot that went unnoticed or undone.

  There was a tension working between our walls that I didn’t quite understand.

  Mom was always on his case about how he screwed up around the house, folding towels and sheets improperly, leaving marks on dishes and huge dust bunnies in rooms he was supposed to have swept. Neglecting the lawn, like he was doing now.

  I guess that would be annoying if he were my husband, but I’d probably be like him, too. Confused and absent-minded. Feeling a little like a failure in my own house. Sometimes I wondered what accident had caused my mom and dad to get together, to stick it out, to have me, to build a home and last in it. I was grateful, I guess, for that. To be alive. But I didn’t get it. Their tastes were the complete opposites of each other, and they both seemed to want different things from life and from a partner. For instance, Mom’s dad died before I was born, but from the photos of him — even as an old man — I could see that he was tall and well-built, and that there was an edge or hardness to him. Something in his eyes that seemed veiled or angry. He had fought in the war and he was silent and authoritative and worked as a foreman at the Ford plant. None of which seemed like my dad, who was slim, just barely taller than my mom, quiet, nerdy, and soft. Who wore that ponytail that I knew my mom hated. (She sometimes walked up behind him wearing a mad grin and her hands miming scissors.)

  The home that they had built was on shaky ground. They fought a lot and never seemed to resolve anything. I was frustrated with both of them. Mom always seemed like the more aggressive one, but she also seemed to have more of a point. I sometimes hated to admit it. Dad must have thought so, too, because he rarely fought back, though I wanted him to. He could say snippy little things back to Mom, or under his breath, but mostly he just took it. Tried to make it up to her even before she was finished. Made promises we all knew he wouldn’t keep, but which sometimes placated Mom, anyway. Later I’d find him lying almost comatose on the couch in the basement, or staring up at the ceiling in their bedroom. It was never pretty. It was like all of the untruth in the world that he had created was running through him, incapacitating him like it was the flu.

  It was worse, though, when I found him doing something that he deemed productive — like polishing one of his replica swords, pretending like nothing was wrong. Maybe going to the vacuum and giving it a half-hearted spin around the house. I tried to keep out of his way when he was like that. I didn’t want to see it. It felt wrong. Maybe it was exactly what Mom was complaining about (the vacuuming — never unpolished swords), but it still didn’t sit right. It always felt like he was somewhere weird — like he was standing on the ceiling where everything was perfect and spotless and I was on the ground where the floor needed to be swept and the trash taken out.

  He did sometimes get angry. But then he’d get on his motorcycle and roar out of the house. It was like it was the only way he knew how to focus his rage. Which was maybe weird, because his motorcycle was so rooted in the present time, in contrast to all of his other methods of distraction. Sometimes, uncharitably, I wondered if when he was doing turns on his Honda he referred to it as his “steed” in his head.

  I wish I was more kind to him. Even just in my head.

  Anyway, it made me worried when he went riding like that because I knew it was dangerous enough riding a motorcycle when you feel okay, and I didn’t like the thought of him taking unnecessary risks just because he’d fucked up a load of Mom’s shirts. Or dropped a bottle of fish sauce on the kitchen floor. Or whatever. I wished the consequences weren’t as high as they were and I thought maybe there was a way in which they didn’t have to be, but I couldn’t see my way to there. No one could.

  When Dad left during a fight, Mom would become wild with rage, practically nuclear, knocking things off tables, yelling at me to get back to my room or to shut the fuck up and leave her alone, even if I wasn’t saying anything. Even if I was making a point of keeping quiet. Even if I was clearly already in my room, trying to concentrate on anything else. But she always calmed down before he got back. Usually she even managed to clean things up a little before then.

  I think Mom wanted Dad to fight back, too. It doesn’t really excuse her anger. But it sometimes felt to me like she was trying to raise him out of his grave. I don’t think she was happy with things as they were, like she thought there was a way she could get them both back on even footing, but that the only way to do that was to stand him up in front of her and shake him until he broke out of it. Then, I don’t know, I guess they’d trade blows in an empty room, like they were kung fu masters in The Matrix, go back and forth until they were blocking each other blow for blow and finally an even match. But that’s not how it worked.

  That’s not how it worked, but it was the only thing she seemed to know how to do.

  I don’t know what Dad was thinking. I know he wanted to make things better for all of us. I know he tried hard to do that. I know he was frustrated. But I think the pattern, the back and forth, the rise and fall, made more of a kind of sense to him. Like one day he would figure it out and change it all, but until then he could sit in it, almost comfortable. Or maybe not — maybe the pattern itself was a kind of comfort, to feel mixed up, maybe even oppressed, by the one that you loved.

  Sometimes I thought Mom was lonely. And that her anger came from loneliness. I understood
that because I was lonely, too. Sometimes I thought that Llor was that feeling — of loneliness. But she was other things, as well, like the feeling you have when you’ve messed up, when you get angry and say something you don’t mean, but you’ve gone too far to take it back. And there’s no way to retrace your steps, or to pretend that it didn’t happen. You’re just broken, and in your heart you wish things were different and that you didn’t have to be evil, but you can’t see the way to change. So you’re forced to work evil over and over, over and over, until something breaks, and you either find redemption or lose your power.

  Llor was going to lose her power. Evie was going to find redemption. I was going to be like Evie, or I hoped so.

  I didn’t know what was going to happen to my parents.

  * * *

  It was more than just my relationship with my mom and dad that made me worry that like Evie I would need to be redeemed.

  One day I stayed late after school, talking with my teacher about an English assignment that I had mysteriously bombed on. Like, really, really bombed. I’d put a lot of effort into it, and I think Ms. Browe could see that, but I hadn’t really done much to satisfy the requirements of the assignment. I could see that in retrospect, looking at the evaluation criteria alongside the finished product. I didn’t use the right number of paragraphs. I quoted from secondary sources, but not in the way that they wanted. I used primary sources, I don’t know why I did that, because that’s not what Ms. Browe had asked for. It wasn’t what we were supposed to be focusing on and I didn’t get any credit for it. My critical-analysis-to-explanatory-or-positioning-sentence ratio was way off. It wasn’t a bad essay — Ms. Browe said that she’d enjoyed reading it, and after I went to see her and told her how confused I was she bumped the mark up to a seventy, which I still wasn’t totally happy with, but which was better than nothing. Anyway, it wasn’t the essay that had me worried about the state of my soul, but something that happened afterward.