“This better get better fast and speak the fuck up,” Dracula says, but his voice is softer now, more like Rocky’s voice in the car.
“She went on a vacation to this island of ponies with her family when she was eleven, and they’d allowed her to take her bike. Blackie was the bike’s name, even though it was a red bike. In her mind, it was a black horse and she found black streamers for the handlebars and that was his mane in the wind and she rode him all around the town, for the whole week. She took Blackie to see the ocean, the bay, and the old man on the beach who made The Last Supper sand sculpture every year. She showed Blackie all the sandy apostles and Jesus. She has pictures I could show you, we could show you, after we give you, after you take us out of here so we can give you more money. So then, at the end of the week, her parents said they couldn’t take Blackie back home, since they had a packed car, and besides, the bike was a piece of junk. They suggested they just leave Blackie outside of a grocery store. She tried with all her might to explain that the bike was her horse, her friend, but they didn’t understand her tears, except as a sign that she was ridiculous and needed to be sent to her room for the last night of that vacation, since she was too old for such spoiled carrying-on.”
He stopped. He took a deep breath. Evvie was amazed that he remembered their exact phrase. Such spoiled carrying-on.
“So she snuck out after they slept and rode for hours out past the town, and some man in a car hit her when she was crossing the highway. Hit and run. She lay there for an hour before someone came and took her to the hospital. She was in a coma for five days, and then, when she finally sat up, the first thing she said was, ‘Where’s Blackie?’ ”
“Yes! And then what?” says Dracula.
“That’s it.”
“No, that isn’t it.”
Ben waits.
“I said that isn’t it. Has to be more.”
“Well, I—”
“What other story can you tell? About her? Your wife? Because that one wasn’t good enough. That one just wasn’t good enough.”
Ben says, “Evvie’s third-grade teacher took a poll of her students as to whether or not she should commit suicide.”
“What? Is that a joke?”
“No.”
Evvie hasn’t thought about that in years.
“And what was her name?”
“Her name was Mrs. Finch.” Mrs. Finch, who came to school in a long blue gown the day of the poll.
“And why’d she want to off herself?”
“I don’t know.”
“Nobody ever told you?”
“Nobody ever told me.”
“So we’ll figure it out. Was it global warming that made her want to kill herself? No, it was not, because we didn’t have global fucking anything back then. Was it a monster that made her want to kill herself? Yes, it was, because we did have monsters back then, did we not?”
“Yes,” says Ben. “We did.”
“And what did the students say?”
“They said no.”
A silence fell.
“And that’s all you got? A goddamn bike and a suicidal teacher?” Dracula laughs and says, “Inside I’m clapping, I’m giving you a standing ovation,” then shakes his head. “Anything else?”
Ben doesn’t hesitate. “She sang in an old-age home when she was twelve at Christmastime.”
That wasn’t true—Ben had done that—had he confused their memories?
“Uh, uh, uh! Stop there. Stop right there. Sit down, Christmastime! Sit the fuck down. You can’t steal a show to save your life, can you?”
Ben stood there.
“Can you?”
“Guess not.”
“Some people understand thee-ate-her, some do not. At least you could have told us a story with a message. Like the humans go to another planet to escape all their fucking garbage and wars, and then they screw up the new planet even worse than this one, and then they blow up every planet in sight. Hear that? Now I’m giving myself a standing ovation on the inside. Sit down. It’s not looking good. God bless you.”
Ben sits back down.
Evvie is up on her feet and running. It’s so dark she isn’t sure where she’s running. She’d lost a feel for where the door might be. Dracula chases her; he’s telling her this was a very bad idea. But she’s fast. She runs forward, then in a circle, then forward again. And she stops running and crouches down on the floor and curls into a ball. He runs past her. But then he’s back. He’s circling her. He’s laughing. He says it’s a pleasure to be in the vicinity. He says he admires her guts. Next thing she knows his hand is on her neck. “You’re the one for me,” he says. “Maybe that’s what you’re trying to say.”
Evvie throws herself around as if having a seizure. She makes a horrible noise, and every part of her body is moving hysterically, violently, and now Rocky Dracula retrieves his hand from her neck, and stands over her saying, what the fuck, what the fuck is this, and she is hoping she could be the human sacrifice of the day and then Ben could be free to find the door, could somehow escape the Wolf and his gun, the Wolf who they hadn’t heard from in a while and who Evvie thought might even be sleeping. She feels Dracula’s foot on her back, the hard shoe pressing down, and it almost feels good. “Stop it,” he orders.
And he doesn’t shoot her. Just stays bent down looking at the freak show that keeps getting worse and freakier before his eyes. She pours every last desire into the seizure, rolling her eyes and managing to make a low, groaning noise that Dracula does not care for at all, and he says so.
It’s too late when they finally hear the door slam. When Evvie looks over, she hallucinates his silhouette against the night sky there for one shocking second. She knows he is outside. Her tears fall hot and fast. Her seizure is over. She keeps making sounds. Rocky stands straight up. He fires toward the door, as if Ben might reappear.
“This wasn’t supposed to happen, Starshine. What the fuck were you thinking?”
He unties her. He untapes her. He screams at the Wolf.
“He flew by me like lightning,” the Wolf whines.
Rocky says he’d trusted her to understand the operation. He’d trusted her. He takes off his mask. Now he can’t promise anything, he says.
Evvie sits there in the dark, unable to speak.
Ben
Ben had tried to wave down cars, and trucks, and nobody had stopped. It was dark, it was the middle of the night, and they could see he was out there without a car, and that meant trouble. He’d run for what felt like hours down a long, narrow secondary highway. He was in and out of breath, weeping, at one point screaming Evvie’s name out loud over and over again as he walked, then growing deeply quiet, conserving whatever energy was left to him. After that long silence, he began to run against the image of her dead.
Finally something like a neighborhood began to appear. When he approached a brick house on the end of a cul-de-sac, sensor lights came on, and by the time he got to the front porch and touched the door handle, a robotic manly voice came blaring out from the intercom. YOU HAVE VIOLATED A PROTECTED PROPERTY. LEAVE IMMEDIATELY. THE POLICE HAVE BEEN CALLED. YOU HAVE VIOLATED A PROTECTED PROPERTY. It kept on repeating itself as he moved to the next house.
Nobody answered in this house, or the next—even as he kicked the white aluminum door with all his might. He’d dreamed a version of this as a child—needing help, going from house to house, someone chasing him, nobody there to let him in. At the fourth house, he slammed down the brass knocker twenty t
imes and pressed down hard on the doorbell so that it rang continuously and shouted, “Someone has to help!” until finally a voice on the intercom to the left of the mailbox said, “Who’s down there?”
“I need your help! Please! My phone died!”
“What seems to be the issue?”
Ben was aware that someone was hanging out of the second-story window, looking down at him.
Ben looked up. “I need your help. Your phone. Some people— My wife is in serious danger.”
The woman ducked back inside, and seconds later, she opened the door with a gun in her hand, her body shapely in her nightgown. When she saw his face, and how Ben put his hands in the air, she lowered the gun. “Really, I promise I only want to use a phone. Nothing else.”
Behind her an older man appeared, rubbing his forehead, and asked her to put the gun back in the closet. Then said to Ben, “She’s been through some things.”
The woman said, “Damn right I’ve been through some things.” But she put the gun down on the table and turned on a lamp while telling Ben to come in. In the light he saw her hard, drawn-on eyebrows. A woman who pilfered some happiness in a tanning salon, a woman who was now married to this older guy who must have rescued her from some circle of hell. The man, bald and sleepy faced in an undershirt and boxer shorts, handed Ben a cell phone, saying, “Sit down. We’ll get you some water. You look like you’re going to keel over.”
His wife had taken some steps back, and stood with arms crossed, looking at her husband with something like contempt.
Ben dialed 911 and asked for cops to come to where he was now so he could take them to the warehouse, so they could rescue Evvie—
“Where are you?” said the cop.
“Where am I?” he asked the woman, who still stood in the center of the room.
She hesitated. “You’re a long way from anything out here.”
“What road? Exact address?”
“You’re at 120 Ethan Allen Court in Meadow Wood Acres.”
He sat on the flowered couch, the draperies behind him holding back the last bruise of night, the woman in the kitchen, watching television, and the man somewhere else. They had given him buttered toast and water. They’d sat with him awhile, and he’d told them what he could—the story spilling out of him too quickly, so that his listeners held their eyes wide open, blinking, saying nothing, but looking at one another, then back to him, then back to one another. “Jesus,” the man finally said. Then they gave him privacy, maybe because he seemed a little crazy, his legs moving frantically like windshield wipers on high speed, and he sat there, biting his nails and thinking how he would thank them one day properly, how he and Evvie would drive out here together with some kind of surprise for them, maybe some money and flowers. If Evvie survived, he told himself (and he couldn’t imagine a more urgent prayer), then they would circle back to one another without a doubt and live their lives transformed.
He’d already circled back. It had happened without his consent. Screaming her name to the sky had taken his heart and shoved it up against hers, and now there was only the one heart, the impossible beating heart of this one life, and here on the flowered couch, imagining her back in the warehouse, he wondered who he’d been that he’d ever managed to leave her. And wondered too if this was punishment—this whole night—for daring to abandon this person who was, he saw now, his life. She’d seen the worst of him, and those days returned: the year he’d spent almost six months in deep depression—Evvie washing his feet with a hot washcloth and rubbing oil into the soles, Evvie getting him to eat, one spoonful at a time, and playing deejay until finally, one night, he’d been able to hear music again—she’d played a beautiful grim song, “See How We Are,” by X, it was playing in his mind as if she’d walked into this room and placed the headphones on his ears, not a happy song, but it had somehow worked to heal him. . . . And then those days after she’d lost the baby—he’d never called it the baby until now—those days after she’d lost the baby he’d given her baths, shampoos, and she’d returned the favor, they were like each other’s children, wrapped in big towels, their bedroom in the old apartment filled with fresh, cold air because Evvie liked to swing the windows wide open no matter the season, and she’d wanted to name the baby, and he’d said no, don’t do that, and if you do, don’t tell me, and she’d put her hand through his hair, soothing him, and saying nothing at all. She’d swallowed the name down, he imagined. He wanted to know what it was. As if it mattered.
Everything mattered. If they could lie in bed and hear “See How We Are” again, two people alive and alone together in their bed with a song, it was all he’d ever ask of life, and even the tedium, even the loneliness, even the despair would be recognized as the gifts they finally were.
In those first years when he’d lie awake at night with her, something old in him, something older than time and unreasonably, unspeakably hurt, some inexplicable isolation he’d never been free of, had been nearly soothed away by her as by nobody else. He’d allowed himself to fall into her strange, slow fairy tales, where the two of them were magnificently lost in the woods but finally taken care of by kindly giants and fairies with learning disabilities and hilarious cooks who spoke in riddles, everything in those fairy tales described meticulously, so that all these years later, though now he trembled and held his stomach tightly and felt cold all over, all these years later he could see the red and white shoelaces of the one giant’s peach-colored shoes. And how he and Evvie, lost children who had stumbled into a new mountainous world, slept in a cradle in a tree-room, the window a space between the thick, green branches that hung down to make walls, and through that green window, snow falling on the peaks across from them, and it fell like music, Evvie said, little notes of endless music, can you hear it, and he could hear it, and then she said a fairy was peeking at them from behind a leaf, and he could see it.
And she’d been there the day he’d been told by an old professor that his piano playing was technically fine but lacked some essential, ineffable quality, and he’d resisted Evvie’s tirade against the professor—Fuck that fucker, Ben!—until she’d done a wickedly accurate impression of the man and he’d ended up laughing then and now right here on this couch as he closed his eyes and there she was on Blackie the horse coming to get him, the long plastic mane flowing in the wind, he would like to ride with her on a horse of his own, but he has to go throw up now.
“Can I use your bathroom?” he called out. Too loudly. The man appeared in the doorway, ushered him toward a small bathroom, and before he could even think to turn on the light, he vomited into the white bowl. Then again. Flushed the toilet and then washed his mouth out. Stood up, found the light, and looked at himself for a long moment in the mirror. Who are you? Really. Who are you?
Two cop cars showed up, four cops, an ambulance, and two paramedics, a fire engine with three or four firefighters.
Ben rode in one of the cars, leading the convoy, sirens blaring.
One of the cops said barely two words and drank a can of Red Bull, drumming his knees and bouncing his head. He looked out the window. The driving cop talked football like they were on their way to a game.
Before they’d left, Ben had blurted the whole story out in the driveway of the people’s house. The cop shook his head and whistled after the story was over, then said, “We’ll get ’em,” but then looked over at his partner with an odd smile, and for a moment Ben wondered if they thought he was making the whole thing up. Another nutcase. The people in the house had stood there at the doorway, watching this, and then, when the car pulled away, the woman had burst through the door and waved good-bye. Ben thought he would never forget that.
He directed the cops to the best of his ability, but his directions were undergirded by a sense of panic that really he had no idea where the warehouses were, that he may have turned left to get into the neighborhood and not right, but there was nothing to do b
ut trust that eventually he would spot the road that led to Evvie. It was close to dawn, and the black night air gave rise to the bruise of morning, and Ben counted deer, six of them, a whole family, in the triangular field to the left. Their silence, their mysterious movements in the predawn cold: something to report to Evvie. And then it came to him that he would also need to tell Lauren—not about the deer, but about all of this, of course, and how strangely it was unfolding inside of him, and he saw himself across from her at one of her beautifully prepared tables. He reached his hand to touch her face, and remembered he loved her, remembered that nothing is simple, that he had things to sort out, that sorrow was coming. And yet Lauren, and Lauren’s table, and Ramona, and their square house with the garden out back, all seemed small, almost miniature, almost devoid of meaning when held next to the idea that Evvie, Evvie, could be dead.
Evvie
She went with Ben to his apartment, finally, at dusk. They sat together in the shelter of their shock, in the darkness, holding hands, talking, and at one point, Ben resting with his head against her chest after he’d told her he would never underestimate what factory farmed animals had to go through again; being in that dark warehouse, utterly powerless, sensing they were going to be killed, was a terror he’d felt viscerally, like any animal would.
She stroked his head and listened to him breathe.
“Yeah,” she said.
“It might take a long time to recover.”
“Yeah.”
After some time passed, he said he was going to Lauren’s. He’d already called her on the phone but didn’t say much; he needed to see her. “I need to sort this out. Will you be OK here?” His eyes held their confusion and love in equal measure. “Maybe we should call someone to come be with you? Cedric or someone? I really don’t want to leave you without—”
First You Try Everything Page 23