Evie of the Deepthorn

by André Babyn

  I couldn’t understand him at all. Usually he just waited things out. Apologized later. Let her tell him how he was wrong.

  Mom pushed the lawn mower away, knocking it on its side. The blade was still spinning, though slowly now. And slower.

  “Fuck you!” she screamed.

  “Let me finish it, Linz.”

  “I don’t fucking think you will!”

  “Just let me fucking do it!”

  They left the lawn mower overturned in the backyard and continued fighting inside. I hurried out of the office and back into my bedroom, where I took out a textbook and lay down on the bed. Obviously I couldn’t focus on the words on the pages in front of me.

  Only it was better to be facing the door, should it open.

  It was better to be reading something that was unequivocally for school.

  After a while I heard a loud crash. Then Mom apologizing, in a tone of voice I’d never heard before. Maybe I’d never even heard her apologize, not really.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  Silence. I heard footsteps. Keys jangling. My mother, again.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  The front door opened and closed. I heard an engine roar to life. The motorcycle. I ran to my window and looked outside. Mom was standing on the driveway.

  “I’m sorry!” she said, more frantic now. “I’m sorry!  ”

  Dad just kept revving the engine over and over again, drowning out her words. Looking out across the street. Not moving, but threatening to. I noticed he wasn’t wearing his helmet. It must have been still inside. I opened my window and leaned out over the sill.

  “Don’t go, Dad,” I called. “Please don’t go.”

  I don’t know why, but I had tears in my eyes.

  Like I could see the future.

  He looked back at me. For a minute — not even that — it looked like he wouldn’t go. Then Mom tried to take the keys out of the ignition and he pushed her away. He revved the engine again.

  “Fuck you!” he shouted.

  Mom started crying.

  “Fuck you!” my dad said again.

  Then he put his bike in gear and roared out of the driveway.

  * * *

  When I was really little and my parents fought, I used to go down to the basement afterward, when my parents were exasperated or teary or spent, but mostly calm, and draw out cards for them on coloured papers with my battered and nubby Crayolas.

  I always felt so sad descending the stairs, quiet and afraid and small, too, like at any moment I might get caught up in the web of another fight. Twisted and tangled and hung upside down from the ceiling while a hurricane ripped apart the house.

  But there was something in the silence and the stillness following a fight that felt good, too, or almost good. Not good, exactly, because I was always too afraid for that. I was still recovering. I guess it was a kind of determination, or the feeling that I was going to knit them together with my goodwill.

  I drew hearts all over the front of the cards and on the inside I wrote that I loved them. And I made sure to say that they loved each other, too, and that they should stop fighting.

  Kind of heartbreaking.

  I was thinking about that after my dad drove off. It had been a long time since a fight of theirs had made me feel so helpless. So long that I had forgotten what it was like. But instead of quietly writing out cards for them after he drove away I lay in my bed with my textbook open beside me and thought about nothing, even though I wanted to think about something, anything, lay like this for what must have been hours, panicked and unthinking, until the phone rang and Mom came into my room and told me what had happened.

  6

  I remember when I first got the idea to write Evie’s story. We were all watching television downstairs. It was a nature documentary, the kind of thing that always used to be on TV. Something slowly narrated by a guy with a vaguely British accent. Mom and Dad were on the couch and I was lying on the carpet. I used to lie on the floor a lot because they were always on the couch when we were all watching something together and I didn’t like to wedge myself between them sitting on either end. It was too much, somehow, to feel trapped between their bodies, too much to feel their individual heat.

  I needed space from them.

  Onscreen a camera watched a trap door spider crouched inside its burrow. There was that camera, dimly lit, and another one set up above the surface.

  It was somewhere in Australia, I think, or maybe in the American Southwest. In any case, it was a chalky, yellow desert. The camera cut between the spider lying in wait and a little grey mouse that was sniffing its way around the hole. Then the mouse tripped one of the spider’s leads and the hole went up, just a crack, just enough for the spider to get into position.

  Then, in a flash, the spider’s legs rose out of the hole and wrapped themselves tightly around the mouse, pulling it under. An instant only discernible because the documentary’s cameras had caught it in slow motion.

  But in the slow-motion replay, I could make out a little girl following them down before the lid closed. Not little, really — or at least that’s not how I thought of her then, because she was the same age I had been. She was dressed simply, in neat but worn clothing, carrying a small, short dagger. She was going after the spider, but not to rescue the mouse. And it wasn’t a mouse — it was a stag that had finally wandered too close, majestic and powerful and already dead by the great spider’s venom.

  The girl had been watching the trap for hours, her and the spider.

  Obviously I was the only one who had seen her.

  I picked myself off the living-room floor and walked up to my room, shutting the door and sitting at my desk. I felt like I was in a trance. Who was the girl entering the spider’s lair? Why did she want so badly to kill the spider?

  What was it going to bring her?

  I wrote a couple pages out in my bloated and uneven script, pages following the girl as she pushed down the tunnel looking for the spider, hoping to catch it by surprise. I decided her name was Evie and that she needed to fight the spider because its venom was the only thing that could stop the ice queen, Llor. That Llor had killed her parents and was the most evil person in all of the Deepthorn. But that she was reclusive and dangerous and protected by an army of unimaginable size.

  I said that Evie had seen Llor once, when she was old enough to remember. Long after her parents had been killed. Llor was wearing a blue dress, iridescent and shimmering, rising above the forest on a floating throne of ice.

  I lost those pages a long time ago. I threw them out when I was in grade nine or ten, because I thought they were clumsy and embarrassing. And because Evie’s story had changed a lot since then. But I still remember the feeling I had writing that scene with the spider out. I felt pristine, like I was perfecting myself, or perfecting something.

  But I still don’t know what that something would be.

  * * *

  After my father’s funeral, I went up to my room and pulled out the eight spiral notebooks that represented all there was of Evie of the Deepthorn and threw them in the kitchen trash. Then I spent the next two hours or so picking lint from my stockings and staring out the window at the hot June sun.

  Something about what I’d done didn’t feel quite final enough, so I went downstairs again and waited around for my mom to leave the kitchen, waited until someone called — people were always calling then — and she answered in the living room, and then I pulled all eight of the notebooks out. I brushed them off with a paper towel and threw them in two grocery bags, then grabbed a can of lighter fluid and some matches from the garage.

  There was a quiet place I knew in the nearby forest. A sudden and surprising clearing where the firs were tight. About eight feet in diameter. A place that was always empty, that I didn’t think anyone else even knew existed.

  The centre of the clearing was pristine, a smooth carpet of needles with only the barest
trace of weeds. I have no idea why nothing ever grew there.

  It was so private and quiet it was almost holy.

  I dug a little hole and burned the notebooks, one by one, watching the fire carefully, making sure it didn’t spread, until all that was left were ashes and a pile of twisted and charred metal spirals, like wrecked strands of DNA.

  I kicked loose dirt over the ashes and stirred them up with a stick, the way that Dad had taught me, until I was satisfied there was nothing burning left. Then I pulled up a tarp of moss and laid it over the pit, saying a short prayer for Evie, Excalibur, and my dad.

  Contrary to my expectations, I didn’t feel upset.

  I only felt solemn and serious from performing my little ritual.

  There was a precision to my thinking on the walk home, a clarity, that I hadn’t felt in the time since the accident. Maybe in months.

  Though I wasn’t thinking about anything in particular.

  Instead I’d been vaporized, turned into clouds.

  When I got back to my room and saw the drawers where I had hidden my notebooks still hanging half-open, I fell onto the carpet and began crying uncontrollably. Like I’ve cried few other times in my life. Crying like I hadn’t been able to since I’d heard about the accident.

  It was so dumb.

  Mom called me down for dinner, but I ignored her and didn’t go down, or move from my bed, and she didn’t come up looking for me.

  Many hours later, when I was certain she was asleep, I snuck downstairs to the refrigerator and ate a trayful of Saran-wrapped finger foods that we’d brought back from the wake. I meant to eat only one or two pieces, but I just kept going, one after another, until the whole thing was gone.

  That’s how I survived for the next two weeks, eating mostly leftovers or dishes that sympathetic friends and neighbours continued to bring us in the weeks following his death. Often late at night or early in the morning if I couldn’t sleep, or as soon as I got home. Every day a little different. Mom spent much of that time on the phone, or lying in bed, or at my grandmother’s house, and she was usually asleep by the time I got up for school. Some nights she came home late, waking me up off the couch with the sound of her keys, and other nights she didn’t come home at all. Or didn’t seem to.

  It felt to me at the time like an encounter between us was indefinitely postponed, where either one of us might have been forced to account for our role in what had happened. I felt certain that we had each played a part in my dad’s death and that we were each somehow responsible, but it wasn’t clear to me, exactly, what our parts were. I think Mom felt the same way. We were circling each other like two draft horses chained to a wheel: never able to meet, only able to see the little that was in front of us, unable to address the death that had us twisting around and around.

  One thing that we didn’t have to worry about during that time was money. There was a little from insurance, though probably not as much as there would have been had he been wearing a helmet or not driving so fast. But there was enough. That, combined with my parents’ savings, would probably have lasted us a while. Mom talked about it, if not to me, then over the phone. In my earshot. The house was paid off, too, or mostly paid off. I can’t remember which.

  What was a surprise to both of us was to learn that Grandma Irene had actually been incredibly wealthy, or that when they were alive together both of my dad’s parents had been, and that after her death Dad had just been sitting on an account filled with their savings and liquidated assets (they’d long since moved into a nursing home) that no one else knew about, just sitting on it as if it never existed or it still belonged to his stepmom.

  It was hard for me to understand how he could have kept a secret like that for so long, or why he didn’t want to touch the money. Mom was understandably upset, saying that it might have come in handy, especially, for instance, to pay for Grandma Irene’s funeral, which they had done out of pocket, but I think she also understood that there wasn’t much use interrogating it. Something was going on in him that obviously was beyond our understanding.

  Had gone on in him.

  I think he probably had a plan, long-term, I think one day he knew he’d have to look at the money square in the face and decide what to do, but that until then he was afraid. Or sentimental. I don’t know which. Maybe they’re the same thing. In any case, he never made even a single withdrawal. He even left the account in the Alberta bank where his mother had kept it, just signing it over to his name at some time in the days following her death, when we’d all flown in for the funeral.

  In any case it was that money that started the flood of renovations and repairs and redecorating in the house, that and the vacations that Mom took on her own and, later, with Dan. It was just a trickle, at first, until I think she became comfortable with the idea that the money really was hers and that it would be difficult to squander.

  We went on vacation once together, when I was seventeen, to a resort in Mexico, where I spent most of my time reading in our hotel room or on the beach or doing laps in the pool, even though she wanted me to go with her to all of the mixers and events that the resort held during that week, in the evenings and during the day, and maybe it was for that reason that she didn’t invite me to come with her again after I went off to school. I was too shy.

  “I just need a break,” she would say over the phone, whenever the subject of another vacation came up. Or “I’ve been realizing just how much I needed this time for myself.” Or “It’s really important for me and Dan to get out of our routines, to reconnect away from the hustle and bustle.”

  Honestly, it made sense to me in the beginning. We’d both been through so much. And I vaguely thought a part of it was coming to me, too. It started to become difficult to hear after I graduated, when I found myself working an endless series of crappy jobs, moving from terrible apartment to terrible apartment, each one worse than the last. I thought, if only I had a little of it — the money, I mean — I could have used it to go to the dentist, or to go on vacation, or to take time off and try to find something better.

  And then I realized the money wasn’t mine and it never had been.

  * * *

  I spent most of my time after the funeral watching television or staring up at the ceiling, waiting for a feeling to come to me that I hoped would help me make sense of things. I was angry at myself, angry for weakly calling to him from my window, for hiding away in my room during the fight, for not running down the stairs, getting in front of his motorcycle, and stopping him from leaving. Or for not trying harder to help him feel better when he was alive.

  I thought there might be something for me to find, some memento or touchstone stored away with his medieval collection or in one of the many boxes they’d sent over from the office. Once school got out I spent every afternoon down in the basement, buried in his things. Haunted by my mother’s voice ricocheting audibly down a vent from the living room, on the phone with high-school friends, relatives, government officials. As well as by the creepiness of wading through the particular and private possessions of my dead father, feeling vaguely like I was trespassing, even though Mom didn’t care what I did and no one else had more of a right to his belongings than me.

  I was comforted by the thought that I was somehow bringing myself closer to him, even if I was doing so in a way he might not have wanted or planned for me to.

  I never found what I was looking for. Most of the boxes from the office contained tax files that we were meant to keep for at least seven years before their disposal. Among these were my father’s meticulously kept day planners, each one filled with his neat and ordered script. Getting neater and more ordered as they progressed. Dating back to a couple years before I was born.

  Apparently he was known around the office for this habit. “We are saddened to lose such a proficient and detailed record-keeper,” they said, in the note that came with his belongings. His records only rarely — and always sparingly — touched on family or personal matters, s
o I was a little thrilled when I found the entry from August 15, 1988: he’d written “Sarah born,” in a different shade of pen. For that same day, though, he had three neat paragraphs of his business activities in an abbreviated and heavily jargoned English. (“Meet with Fr, Re, Ro, Pe: discuss int. fl. Too high? Ro for, rest against. Ja lat. prom., new div. Will sit in on hir. com.”) Then, just under the note about my birth: “Sa has Li’s eyes, Te’s mouth. Will Sa take anything from me, I wonder?” I did have my mother’s eyes. I assumed that “Te” was a reference to Grandpa Edward, the same one I had seen above the mantel, who died before I was born. I guess the comparison was okay if it was just to my mouth.

  Or just when I was an infant.

  The deeper I went into my dad’s records, the less they seemed to evoke, as if he was becoming less particular, more abstract, as time went on. Or as if he was just less interested in taking notes intelligible to anyone but him. (Doubtless this was why his office sent the records back to us.)

  Although he did note my parents’ anniversary, and my (but never his or my mom’s) birthday every year, something about his deliberate and emotionless record-keeping began to alarm me, especially in contrast to how floundering and random he could be at home. It was nothing I could pin down, just a feeling I had the more I read (or skimmed) through the planners, like I wasn’t going forward in time but backward, being crushed — by something of my father I couldn’t name or detect otherwise — under the weight of all the terrible nothing he had written while at work.

  His swords and armour spoke even less, hanging inert, lifeless, from their brackets, offering only the distant smell, in their grips, of his hand sweat from years of fairs, and my distorted reflection in the clouded glass of their steel.

  7

  Sometimes I wish I could go back and read Evie again. To see what I made. To see if it corresponds to my memories. Enough time has passed that I think I’d be able to look past its faults, to the core of what I was doing, which I still think seems more vital than anything I have written since. And maybe it would be helpful, too, to be able to recognize its faults (I’m sure there are many) and to remember that I have improved, that I am undoubtedly a better writer now. But it’s still the longest and most comprehensive thing I’ve ever written.