“Waltzing around like Pittsburgh’s queen of Sheba?”
“Not exactly.”
“You look like a ghost.”
“Caught a chill.” Evvie headed up the steps.
Did they let dogs go to psychiatric hospitals if the patients were especially attached to them? Could she fake blindness and Ruth could be a Seeing Eye dog? After all, she was metaphorically as blind as a person could be. Her heart began to race. It beat so hard she was afraid it would burst out of her chest. She walked into her empty room and lay down on the bed, wondering if she was really having a heart attack. You could definitely have a heart attack at forty-two.
Ben would not believe her. But she couldn’t move. She could not move off the bed or her heart would crash through the wall of her chest and land on the floor. Ben was probably out there thinking she was up to something. Thinking she was escaping. He would be furious. He would be thinking how he’d sic the cops and some hound dogs on her trail. But here she was, pinned to the bed, fighting to breathe.
She heard his footsteps coming up the steps. “Evvie?” and for that split second, because his voice was so familiar, because his footsteps had a sound as intimate as breath, it seemed that none of this year had ever happened, and he was returning from his long day to be with her. After this second was gone, there was only her heart, and her terror, and him at the door starting to say something, then falling silent when he saw her face. She saw her face in his, just as if his were made of mirror, and clenched her eyes shut against the image. “Ben, my heart. It’s beating so fast.”
He didn’t say anything. He stood there, taking his breaths, his eyes downcast, his mouth pulled in tightly.
“I might be having a heart attack.”
Still he didn’t say a word.
“Evvie. I’m not coming to your rescue. It’s not all right. Nothing will ever be all right again.”
“Ben?”
“Can you just gather what you need so we can go?”
“Soon. Just let me—”
“I don’t like prolonging agony.”
Behind him, Diligence Chung appeared in her purple hat.
“Is she sick?” Diligence said, her face impassive and her voice high and gentle.
“Yes,” Ben said.
“I can sing,” Diligence said. “It maybe help her.” Diligence stood there and sang in her long skirt and her hat. Her pale, serious face filled Evvie with longing. Next life, I will be like Diligence.
“Woman across the hall with nice dog
Never ever giving up on Love!
For God is with woman and dog
Who never giving up on love!”
“Thank you, Diligence.”
Diligence scurried back down the hall.
The song had allowed Evvie to rise from her bed and stand up straight. Her heart was still threatening to explode, but she was capable of putting a hairbrush, some clothes, some lipstick, and a few books into a white plastic bag, and then, into an old brown suitcase, she packed up everything else.
Evvie
On a July evening, the day before Evvie’s forty-seventh birthday, she stood under a red flowered umbrella in a playground. The rain poured down soft and steady and the children loved it, running and crying out to one another below the hot and hovering night sky. A nearly full moon was low and orange and surrounded by shreds of high purple clouds sailing off to the north in a high wind. Evvie watched the kids, and also the cars streaking by on the highway across from the playground. Tomorrow, for her birthday, she was headed to the ocean.
The playground itself was sprawling and featured a sliding-board dinosaur, several swing sets, climbing walls, cubbyholes, and a ground covered with green foam so that children could fall without getting hurt. She knew a few of the parents who were here tonight, talking under the green pavilion, but preferred the drumming of rain on the sturdy flowered umbrella. Her nephew Hugo, Cedric’s son, was waving to her over on top of a jungle gym. She waved back, nodding and smiling her encouragement. And then someone else was waving.
She hadn’t even talked to him in more than four years. But he was walking toward her, and following close behind, a small child, galloping, curly-headed, barefoot. Maybe two years old. A girl?
“Hi, Ben!” The words came up from her depths. And then her heart began a loud, steady drumming, the sort of drumming that sounds out at the beginning of a parade. She might have started marching in place, were she not frozen.
“Hey!” He stood there, a yard away, apparently stunned. The child hid behind his leg.
The last time she’d seen his face was four years ago when he’d shown up in the hospital one night for the visiting hour, just five days after she’d signed herself in. He’d brought her some dark chocolate and a loaf of French bread. They’d sat together—she on the side of the bed in a pale blue hospital gown and gray socks, he in his jeans and dark green sweater and wristwatch, seated on a straight chair far across the room, his arms folded tightly. The window by the bed framed the black night. The room sucked up all the words they tried to say to each other.
He’d leaned forward, elbows on knees, then pinched the bridge of his nose.
Then somehow, they’d started to laugh. Neither had said anything funny. Maybe they’d just looked at each other for a moment too long, and a sense of absurdity had overtaken them. But they’d laughed until their sides ached, both of them bending in half, laughed until Evvie had ended up sobbing. He’d stood up, walked over to the bed, held her hand, sat down next to her, waited for her to calm down, then rose and said he had to go, that he hoped she’d get out soon but not too soon, that he hoped she’d never do anything that crazy again, and please, please don’t call him for a long, long time.
Of course she’d honored his request not to call. Would have honored it without his asking. And that same year, when she saw his back while waiting in line at Panera Bread, she rushed outside and started walking in the pouring rain across the busy parking lot over to Barnes & Noble.
Once, in the grocery store she dove into a frozen foods freezer while he wheeled his cart past, humming with an iPod on his head and a long list in his hand.
Another time she saw him and Lauren (in silver clogs) walking hand in hand down in the Strip District one sunny Saturday. They were headed toward her on the sidewalk, and she’d ducked into Pennsylvania Macaroni Company, where she’d taken an hour or so to buy some cheese and olives until the coast was clear.
Standing in the cold at a stoplight on Penn Avenue, she once saw him waiting in his car for the light to change. She almost cried out “Ben!” but instead bent down to tie her shoe for a long minute before he pulled away.
She was the antistalker, guarding the great distance between herself and the one she loved, keeping him safe from anything she might do or say, ever again.
And she had Ruth, sole custody. As it turned out, Lauren’s dog was jealous of other animals. Once, early on, Ben had sent Ruth a box of bones in the mail, care of Evvie’s mother.
“Wow, so how have you been?”
“Good. This is Molly. Molly, this is Evvie.”
The child clung to his leg, but peeked up at Evvie, the eyes great dark pools reflecting the evening.
“Hi, Molly. Nice to meet you.”
“What are you doing here?” Ben looked around anxiously, as if hoping she was there with a child and not some crazy lone person haunting the place. Evvie wanted to explain to him all the ways she’d changed. All she’d seen and done. How she was nobody to fear, ever again. She was hardly the same person anymore, but how to convey that when his presence rendered her nearly speechless? “I’m here with Cedric’s son. Hugo. He’s over there with that blond kid.” She pointed. I’m no longer who I was. I’m better. I’m sorry I couldn’t have been better with you. She felt like the Tin Man, moving her arm. The few words she managed to say felt heavy; she
had to push them into the summer evening, which felt suddenly, impossibly, thick.
“I saw you one day with the guy—I think he’s the guy who worked at the convenience—”
“Yeah. Ranjeev. He doesn’t work there anymore.”
“Your significant other?”
“In a way. We take long walks together.”
“Long walks.”
“Yeah. He had to quit that job before I could finish that movie I tried to make. I’m working on something else.”
The small girl kept gazing up at Evvie. Evvie smiled down at her for a moment, waving.
“So what’s your new—”
“My friend Gigi is manager of this cable station and hired me to do a film on a hospice.”
“Wow. Great.”
She wanted to tell him that Celia wanted her to travel to Poland with her next summer, that she’d long been saving up for it, that she’d helped organize an animal rights convention in Cleveland, that one day she’d maybe go to India with Ranjeev. Wanted to tell him about Ranjeev’s cousin, a woman who built her own bicycles and was teaching Evvie how to do so, that she missed his mother, and that it hurt that he didn’t know any of this, seemed utterly wrong that he didn’t know anything about her life now.
“And how ’bout you?”
The child was in his arms. She was so beautiful and substantial, Evvie couldn’t stop staring. She was the sort of child who stared back with calm interest, holding your gaze, stilling the world.
“Same company. Got promoted. It’s OK, but I’m looking for something else. I’m doing some metal sculpture like I did in college. Sound sculpture. I wish—” He stopped himself.
She smiled at the little girl, and after a hesitation, the little girl smiled back. A little pirate smile. Evvie melted a little. “Wow, I’d love to see it. Maybe we could have coffee sometime and then go visit one of your sound sculptures.”
Ben didn’t say anything.
“Or maybe not. Sorry. I—”
“Would be tough to explain that to Lauren, considering.”
“Yeah. Considering.”
“But it’s not like you’re not—”
“What?”
Ben lifted the child up high on his shoulders, her small hands clutching on to his hair. Behind her was the moon. Ben looked at Evvie. His face filled with a collision of feeling.
“Not like I’m not what?” she said, wincing up at the little girl now.
Evvie swallowed. Ben looked off to the side, then back at Evvie.
“So I better go,” he said, tugging on the small feet of the girl. “Say good-bye to Evvie, Molly. And wish her happy birthday. Her birthday’s tomorrow.”
“Bye-bye. Happy Birthday!”
Evvie tried to say good-bye, but could only wave.
Hugo was over by the swings, waiting for one to be empty. He was five, a durable little dark-eyed kid with a round face, curly gold hair like Cedric’s, baggy green shorts, and sneakers with flashing lights. He watched Evvie walk up to him with his steady, curious gaze that often seemed to belong to someone older. “What’s wrong?” he said, when she got closer, and she smiled down at him and said that nothing was wrong. He took her hand. His hand was sweaty and warm and always a surprise, the way it held to hers, the way it trusted. She was his favorite, the aunt who was paid to walk twenty-eight dogs a week and sometimes invited him to come along. He had memorized all the dogs’ names and would be more than happy to chant them upon request.
Soon, there was one swing open. The rain had become mist. Hugo ran toward the swing, sat down, grabbed hold of the chains, and told Evvie, “Push me!” She walked over behind him, and started off with a steady push. “Higher!” She pushed him higher and higher until the chains twisted and buckled and he screamed with joy, his legs kicking the air. After a while he was singing a song about a red bird, something he’d known forever.
Tomorrow she would drive to the beach with Ranjeev, who liked most of all to take long walks, rain or shine.
Ranjeev liked silence.
You could learn from silence if you stayed quiet. It had so many qualities. One day it was the silence you might hear after an earthquake, while other days it surrounded you, curative and lit with blinding sun, like a warm blanket draped over you on a winter morning in your bed. Still other days, in the middle of silence, a distant siren sounded, as if someone light-years away was coming to retrieve the injured world, Ranjeev said. Do you hear it?
You had to learn to listen, and how to take it in—the silence, the siren. You had to breathe.
Silence could hold everything about you, no matter how strange, how wrong, how broken, and it wouldn’t let you go.
If you listened to it long enough, day after day, year after year, the voices in your mind getting smaller and quieter, you might find moments where silence turns into God, Ranjeev had explained.
The swing beside Hugo emptied, and she walked over and took it. And she was here and nowhere else. Here in this playground on the swing beside Hugo, who was belting out a song, here in the darkness beneath an orange moon that was wet as fruit. What she carried, this love that wouldn’t, couldn’t die—sometimes it was pain that flashed in her heart like a diamond. She clung to the chains of the swing and started rising up into the sky.
“Sing!” said Hugo.
Acknowledgments
Thank you:
Nicole Aragi, best imaginable agent, for your patience, encouragement, and brilliant editing.
To the folks at HarperCollins, especially Gail Winston, for your excellent sensibility as editor, and your contagious enthusiasm. Maya Ziv, for your grace and generosity as you worked on so many details. And Shelly Perron, phenomenal copy editor.
Thanks to those writers who helped me as I worked: Don Challenger, whose own writing and great humor inspired me to begin; Jane Bernstein, for ongoing support and perceptive comments on the first draft; Lawrence Wray, for reading the first draft and steering me past my blind spots, and for buying an Evvie coat; and Charlotte Daniels, for reading early on, in the middle, and then again at the end, and for giving me the gift of a week in her perfect cabin where I finished the manuscript.
Thanks also to Patrick and Patricia Tierney, who listened to the first pages of this aloud and told me to keep going, and to Cynthia Taibbi, who read the finished manuscript.
Thanks to my family and all my friends, far and near, for your invaluable support and presence in my life.
And to those who lived with me as I wrote: Patrick, for sustaining love, faith, and friendship; and Rosey and Anna, for outlandish comedy and kindness.
Finally, a heartfelt thank-you to Drue Heinz, whose generosity and support of fiction made possible the career of so many writers, including mine.
About the Author
JANE MCCAFFERTY is author of the novel One Heart and two collections of stories, Thank You for the Music and Director of the World and Other Stories, which won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. She is the recipient of an NEA award, the Great Lakes New Writers Award, and two Pushcart Prizes. She lives in Pittsburgh, where she teaches at Carnegie Mellon University.
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Also by Jane McCafferty
Thank You for the Music
One Heart
Director of the World and Other Stories
Credits
Cover design by Jarrod Taylor
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
FIRST YOU TRY EVERY
THING. Copyright © 2012 by Jane McCafferty. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McCafferty, Jane.
First you try everything : a novel / by Jane McCafferty.—1st ed.
p. cm.
EPub Edition © January 2012 ISBN: 9780062188199
ISBN 978-0-06-621062-9 (hardback)
1. Middle-aged women—Fiction. 2. Married people—Fiction. 3. Identity (Philosophical concept)—Fiction. 4. Pittsburgh (Pa.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3563.C33377F57 2012
813’.54—dc22
2011028528
12 13 14 15 16 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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First You Try Everything Page 25