Evie of the Deepthorn

by André Babyn

  * * *

  Carl was waiting for me when I unlocked the front door to the house, a little white-and-orange arrow streaking to the entrance. I pushed back with my foot, catching him off-balance, forcing him to sit back and blink slowly in the darkness. When I had the door closed behind me and put my stuff on the bench he brushed my leg and chirped meaningfully, which I knew meant I want food. Instead I picked him up, cradling him like a child, holding him close to my face, and I know he liked it because his whole body was soft and he was purring, but he also tried to bite me on the nose because he was hungry, so I pitched him forward and let him hit the ground and take a few steps forward.

  He’s not like most cats, because he chirps instead of meows, but also because he carries himself not at all like a cat but like a weird, insistent human baby, though also a sharp one, if you’re not careful. He doesn’t mean anything by his sudden moments of ferocity — sometimes I think he thinks that’s what it means to show love: to bite down as hard as possible into the one you care about, to get your claws stuck in their hand as a means of demonstrating the depth of your feeling.

  The house had changed a lot in the years since I’d left it. First Mom had re-shingled the roof and redone the floors, a dark, cool granite over the pale and fading hardwood that was there before. After Dan moved in they’d updated the living-room furniture and bought all-new appliances, taking down the far wall in the kitchen and bringing the room out fifteen feet to make room for a harvest table that stood in the sunshine pouring down through newly installed windows, large and angled and running pretty much from the floor to the ceiling of the new extension. To be honest, it looked pretty good. When I called home — which wasn’t often — Mom would complain that Carl had taken an interest in the drawstrings for the new venetian blinds, plucking them with his claws when he was hungry and trying to get her attention. She said that some days she wanted to strangle him or throw him outside to fend for himself.

  But I told her he was too soft and pliant to survive out there on his own. He’d never been outside in his whole life, except once when he was six months old — after hours of searching I found him covered in cobwebs and cowering out behind the shed.

  “I know, honey,” she would say, in a tone of voice that made me worry that she didn’t know.

  There was a note on the bureau in the foyer with some basic instructions, and that note explained there were more notes left around the house, wherever Mom and Dan thought they would be helpful. As if I didn’t know the house at all or couldn’t figure it out on my own. How hard was it to understand the thermostat, which I had adjusted up and down as soon as I was tall enough to reach the switch? The note in the kitchen explained that they hadn’t had time to feed Carl that morning because they were running late for their flight. But they’d had time to write a note saying so? Also, it concluded, there were pork chops and mashed potatoes in the refrigerator. “Bon appétit!  ” she had written, with a little smiley face at the bottom.

  After I got Carl his kibble, changed his water, and scooped out half a can of wet food, I opened the refrigerator door and stood in the light for a few minutes, totally dazzled by its contents. I have never been able to keep my fridge as well-stocked as my mother does, both due to economic and moral reasons. I took out some eggs, the mashed potatoes, the pork chop, some cooked peas, and the butter, and I fried the eggs, mashed potatoes, and the peas together and slid the pork chop into the compost.

  I’m a vegetarian — I’ve been one for a while.

  (It wouldn’t have kept.)

  (I know I’m still a brat.)

  I sat at the table by the windows and watched myself eat in the reflection over the black, trying to make details out in the backyard. I thought there were a few trees that hadn’t been there last time, and maybe the outline of a new barbecue. I could hear Carl by the cabinets, inhaling his food.

  I knew my mom was much happier than she had been before, much happier, more comfortable, but I sometimes wished I didn’t have to see it.

  When I finished eating I poured myself a glass of orange juice — more for the novelty than anything, since I don’t buy it myself — and went to sit out in the living room. I didn’t want to go upstairs yet.

  I don’t know why, exactly.

  I remembered my mother telling me that the couches had recently been professionally cleaned, but they were still plastered with Carl’s little white hairs. Above the mantel there were new photos in bronze frames, many of people I didn’t recognize. An older photo, with a label running along the bottom, caught my eye — my mother’s grandfather and his brothers: Joseph, Edward, Robert, leaning against a worn-out wooden fence in front of a barn. The Stuart homestead was about forty minutes up the road, in a town I’d only known through the stories my grandfather had told me about his childhood. We visited it, once, but by that time it had long belonged to someone else — we’d only stood out by the car and peered down over the new white picket fences, trying to imagine the poverty and the wilderness of a time before, as it was in the stories, when they’d still had to clear and prepare the land, piece by piece, themselves.

  All of the brothers looked to be about the same age I was in the photograph, in their midtwenties. I took a long, close look at Edward, whom I’d always been told I resembled, but I didn’t look anything like him. Or at least I hoped I didn’t — he was short and stout and his ears stuck out like a goblin’s. And on the whole his features were much sharper than mine.

  Or maybe that was just my imagination.

  I liked to think in any case that my personal appearance had rebounded from the lows of high school. I’d learned how to dress myself in my early twenties, finding clothes that fit me and flattered my body, which had never really been so bad. I went running occasionally, too. Sometimes I did crunches or yoga with Tom. It had been a long time since I’d had any real trouble dating.

  Beyond the trouble that everyone has and which always follows me around.

  I noticed that there was a pile of Carl’s barf hardening in the corner by the window. It was difficult to say how old it was. I went into the kitchen and got some paper towels and a rag and the bottle of vinegar and let the vinegar soak into it for a little while.

  “Bad Carl,” I said, while I was wiping up the last of the barf, much later. “You’re very bad.” But I think he could tell that I was happy to be saying something, anything, in that large and empty house. He raised his head from where he was lying on the couch and gave me what seemed like an odd kind of smile.

  My phone buzzed on the coffee table. It was a text from Tom: “going out with Jerry. if i don’t talk to you later have a goof night.”

  I decided to ignore the typo. I didn’t want to be petty. When I texted him my “good night” he responded with a smiley face.

  I hate it when he does that.

  As promised, there was a cheque with the note in the foyer. I wondered briefly why it was so much smaller than I expected it to be. Watching the house wasn’t a vacation for me. Not really. That’s what I’d told her. I was missing a whole week of work. While I was thinking this over I did the dishes, slowly, letting my hands linger under the hot water. Carl went back and forth underneath me, rubbing first one leg and then the other. He was really a sweet cat. I gave him a bit more kibble, to make up for the morning, grabbed my stuff, and went upstairs.

  At the far end of the hallway, across from the landing, was my parents’ room. The door stood ajar, three or four inches, as if there were someone inside waiting for me.

  I tried to ignore it.

  There was a note on my bed. It was from my mother, explaining that it had just been made up.

  “Don’t worry,” it said, “I’ve washed the sheets tons since the last time you were here. Over and over. And over again!” There was another smiley face by her name, but it didn’t matter. The note was an arrow, flying at just the right height and speed. I threw it on the floor, next to the stacks of boxes that had been moved into my room during the base
ment renovation.

  I tried to, but found I couldn’t, cry myself to sleep.

  5

  My parents were always happiest in the mornings.

  In the hour or so between waking and when my dad had to leave for work you could almost see why they got together in the first place, how my father softened my mother, how, in turn, she created hard limits for him, stimulating and spurring him forward — preventing him from becoming too soft.

  At least in that moment. At least in their imaginations.

  But just because they were happiest in the mornings didn’t mean they were always happy in the mornings. Sometimes, especially after a fight the night before, I would pad downstairs only to find that they weren’t speaking at all. Mom would be banging the pots around unnecessarily, or standing in the corner with her coffee, arms crossed, and Dad would be sitting silently, with a wounded expression on his face, pretending to read the paper. Or else he’d be gone already, not even touching the coffee Mom had poured out for him as soon as they woke up.

  I’d ask whatever stupid question popped into my head first, just to disturb the silence. Something like “Where’s the cereal?” or “Are we reallllly out of peanut butter?” Those questions always got the responses they deserved, indifference or anger.

  But often the night worked its magic on them. My parents, kind to each other. My dad telling a corny joke and my mother laughing. Her bending down to kiss him on the forehead before he left for work. Sometimes even after a fight.

  It was like utopia, just as unreal and hazy and far away.

  It was like my parents chose to ignore all of the issues heaped up between them, like all that mattered of that history were their years of proximity, nothing else. Like closing your eyes and trusting the other person not to murder you in your sleep was all it took to reconcile. I couldn’t imagine them actually talking about their problems, mainly because their fights were always the same thing, over and over, as regular as a metronome.

  I thought they might have gone on like that forever, if they’d had a chance to.

  It was kind of heartbreaking to see my dad come home after the good mornings, the really good mornings, already with a defeated look on his face from his hours at work. Or for me to come home from school and know, just from a sound Mom made upstairs, that she was in a bad mood.

  Once I tried to cheer Dad up by asking about when he met Mom — maybe not the best question, in retrospect — and he told me the story of when I was born instead.

  I’d heard it before.

  “You were so little, Sarah. Like a loaf of bread. Just the tiniest little thing. I remember thinking — there’s a whole human here. This person might grow up to be taller than me. There’s a whole life here, a whole little life. It was the first time I’d ever held a baby. Your mother thought you had gas — she said you’d been cranky all morning. But when I picked you up, you got quiet. So quiet. It was like wind going through trees. I looked over at your mom, and she was smiling, and of course I was smiling, too, and in that instant I could see all of us, together, a little family …”

  We were sitting in the den. There was a TV show on but I don’t remember what. Dad had the latest issue of Renaissance folded over in his lap.

  “That’s not what I asked you,” I said.

  He had a faraway look in his eye, which I knew meant the conversation was over.

  “Hm?” he said.

  “I asked you about meeting Mom.”

  Dad ruffled my hair, and it kind of seemed like he was looking right through me, so I didn’t bother asking the question again.

  * * *

  The night I got in I had another dream. It was about the house, which in my dream was difficult to reconcile with the house that I was in: it was unfinished, unlit, dark, cracks in the wall seeping fog and light. Like in a standard horror movie, an abandoned house, raw camera footage heavily saturated with blue. I was lost, or maybe I wasn’t lost, but paralyzed, even though I was moving constantly through the rooms.

  Perhaps it was a kind of awe.

  The house looked different, but I knew it, intimately.

  Somewhere a phone was ringing and I managed to pick it up. It took me a long time to get to the receiver, and then a voice spoke clearly in my ear — a woman’s voice — first a series of numbers, over and over, the same four numbers, 1313 or 3131, 3131 or 1313, or just three or just one, but somehow the same number, like it could be both at once, then it was speaking about the future or the past, the year in which everything happened or everything would converge, “like an arrow” — or like arrows? — the dream we were living or the life that we’d dreamed. None of it made any sense.

  “What?” I said, but the line was quiet, not like it had gone dead, but like there was someone there who had decided to hold their breath. “What?” I said, with a feeling suddenly that there was no one on the other end but that I had been speaking to something else and that they were still there.

  The house. A gust of wind. My dad.

  Outside I saw a pair of headlights, far away, doing circles among the trees, trees that weren’t there in reality, but were there in my dream, trees that I could only see thanks to the halo of light from the motorcycle’s headlights, a motorcycle with an intent rider whose face I could not make out. Doing circles forever like it was the job of the motorcyclist to do circles. Like that was their purpose. It was like the motorcycle was being piloted by an intelligence that only understood circles — only circles, first one and then another, almost a figure eight, but not quite.

  There was a bunch of other stuff in the dream, but all that I remember clearly is the phone call and the motorcyclist. And the house, of course, though it wasn’t the house and I couldn’t recall what it looked like, aside from the waste and the emptiness and the shifting light.

  In the dream I watched the motorcycle, for a long time, until the limited intelligence of the rider (or maybe I should say focused intelligence) began to freak me out, like my vision was turning inside out, somehow moving slowly closer to a consciousness that I didn’t want to touch.

  Like if I touched it the headlights would turn toward me and ride down my throat. Like whoever was riding the motorcycle would open their mouth and swallow me in one gulp.

  I wanted to stop looking out the window, but I was afraid to, frozen stuck. Everything in me was fighting this fear, kicking and striking out. Trying to scream, but hearing no sound.

  That’s how I woke up, struggling with my sheets, screaming — first choked off, sputtering, forcing out the sound, then full and high, long and terrified, over and over again. Like a warning klaxon sounding far away, outside my control. After I calmed down, panting and sitting up, I heard a chirp, hesitant and questioning, from the floor.

  “I’m okay, Carl,” I said.

  Moments later he was up on the bed, nuzzling me, and I lay back down and pulled him close to my chest.

  * * *

  There was a huge fight the day Dad rode off for good.

  I was fifteen. Mom decided she was fed up with the grass outside and went to cut it herself. It had grown little feathery heads full of seeds that twinkled with the morning dew. They were beautiful. I was working in my room and I watched her from my window. She overprimed the lawn mower — she was apoplectic with rage — and when she pulled the rip cord it blew out a huge black cloud of exhaust.

  It was the weekend. Dad was out riding his motorcycle and I’d quietly shut the door to my room when I realized what she was going to do. I thought it was likely that at any moment she would storm inside and order me to take over. Even over the throaty call of the mower I could hear Mom curse and swear as she navigated over willow branches and other obstacles. For some reason she was wearing short-shorts and ballerina flats and her legs were coated in grass clippings.

  I leaned back in bed and thought about Evie — Evie confident, galloping through the forest on the back of Excalibur. Focused and clear, marching through light flowing radiant in husky waves through breaks i
n the canopy.

  Sometimes I think back to that moment, when I miss her, think back to how free and clear and definite she was once in my mind.

  I didn’t look out the window again until I heard Dad’s motorcycle pull up in the driveway. When he realized what was happening he stood moping in the driveway with all of his riding gear on. Looking almost like a sad astronaut. Who had maybe just touched down on the wrong planet. A planet that had already been colonized. An astronaut embarrassed about having to radio control and explain what had happened. A moment later he came out again, without his helmet and gloves, and offered to take the lawn mower from Mom and finish the job.

  “No,” she shouted. “It’s too late. It’s getting done now. I’m doing it.”

  He told her that he was sorry. “Be reasonable,” he said. “Let me do it.” I was surprised I could hear him over the motor from the second floor. I guess he was shouting, too.

  Mom just kept pushing. Dad went back inside. I could hear him moving around, slamming doors, rattling dishes. That was unlike him. He was restless and looking for something to do, but he was mad, too, and he wasn’t afraid to be. I guess nothing seemed right. Finally he went outside again. Mom had moved to the backyard. I watched them from the office. He asked her again to let him finish, and she ignored him. It made sense to me — she was almost done. She’d done it so quickly. Why should he take credit for something that wasn’t his at all? I wanted him to take out a rake or something and gather up all of the clippings, which were lined up like sown hay in little rows marking the path of the lawn mower. Instead he tried to take the machine away from Mom — stupid and dangerous — and managed only to shut it off as they were wrestling for control.