Evergreen

by Rebecca Rasmussen

  Naamah, he thought. Naamah.

  “Did you hear that, Bill?” she said to the bartender. “He’s my fairy godfather. He doesn’t want anything.”

  “I heard,” the bartender said.

  “Yeah, I’ve heard that one before, too,” she said.

  “I have something that belongs to you out in my truck,” Hux said, visualizing the piece of pink paper in the glove compartment. He wanted to take off her boot and see if that curve was still there.

  “It’ll take more than a hamburger to get me in your truck, Bud,” she said.

  Hux handed her his wallet, which contained just under a hundred dollars, what was left of the money his father had put in the sugar tin before he died. Leah had tried to get him to spend it on a kayak. She said a leaky old rowboat was no way to cross the river. When she was mad about her shoes getting wet, she used to hide the oars in the forest.

  Naamah looked through the wallet, took out the crisp bills, and counted them one by one before she stuffed them into the pocket of her jeans.

  “I’ll call you the Lord Almighty, if that’s what you want,” she said. “You’re one of the sick ones. Drive up here even though you have a wife and kid, right? You’re either going to be rough, which’ll cost you extra, or you’ll want me to hold you. I know your type.”

  “I just want to talk,” Hux said.

  “At least you’re not bad looking,” she said, plucking a fry off his plate. “Your beard’s going to scrape me up, but I can live with that. Some of them you have to wait till dark to be with. You’d think they’d smell pure like the trees with what they do all day, but they don’t. It’s disappointing, if you want to know the truth.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “You sure you know what you’re doing, Bud?”

  No, Hux thought, because he didn’t. He offered her a peppermint stick, which she tucked into her shirt pocket. The next one he offered her she ate right in front of him. When she licked the peppermint stick, she closed her eyes for a minute as if the sugar were transporting her somewhere bright and sweet and cheerful. She swung her legs a little on her stool, but stopped when she noticed Hux looking at them.

  When she’d chewed up the last of the red-and-white swirls, Hux got up from the stool, hoping he wouldn’t have to ask her to follow him, which he didn’t. She took his arm, and the two of them walked to his truck.

  “So you’re a gentleman then,” she said.

  “Do you mind if we drive a bit?” Hux said, opening the passenger door for her and closing it when she got in.

  “That’ll cost you more,” she said.

  “All right,” Hux said, putting the key in the ignition and trying not to think about what she thought he was enlisting her for.

  The two of them drove up the twisting dirt road, past a group of men who were working on taking down an old-growth pine tree in what was left of the light. A few of them were standing on stakes and harnessed to the trunk high up in the tree, and the others were looking on, waiting with chain saws and the chipping machine that would make mulch out of the branches. When they first moved to Evergreen, Hux’s father had cleared the land around their cabin. He said he’d never worked harder on anything than all those stumps, all that pesky milk thistle. Hux’s mother said he used to leave when the sun came up and come home when the sun went down. She saw him as much she saw the moon.

  “Can I smoke?” Naamah said, putting her feet up on the dashboard. She pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one of them. “Want one?”

  “No,” Hux said, breathing easier once they’d turned out of the camp and were headed down the county road in the direction of Evergreen. When the pines that towered over the road turned into grass and weeds, Hux steered the truck to the side of the road.

  “The county police might drive by,” Naamah said. “They come out here sometimes.”

  Though he didn’t want to frighten her, Hux locked the doors.

  “So that’s how you want it to be,” Naamah said. “I knew you were too nice to be normal. Can I at least finish my cigarette before you unbuckle your belt?”

  “Sister Cordelia,” Hux said because he didn’t know how else to tell her why he was there. He hated that he was wearing a belt. He hated Sister Cordelia, his father, even his mother, for a few beats of his heart. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. They were supposed to have grown up together like he and Gunther had. They were supposed to be brother and sister, not what she thought they were right now.

  Hux expected her to try to unlock the door and run away from him. He’d been so occupied with trying not to hurt her he hadn’t thought about the possibility of her hurting him. As if she were an animal, she started clawing at his face and neck.

  She growled at him. She bit. She snapped.

  “Christ! Christ! Christ!” she said, swiping at Hux’s eyes with her fingernails before he could raise a hand to protect himself.

  She was yelling and crying all at once.

  “You don’t get to do this to me,” she said. “You let me go.”

  Hux wasn’t sure whom she was talking to. When she’d scratched his skin raw, and the blood turned his collar red, she started scratching her own face, and Hux used his force to pin her to the seat so she couldn’t hurt herself.

  “I know what happened to you, Naamah,” Hux said. “My mother is your mother. I’m your brother. Hux.”

  As if his name was made of magic, Naamah stopped fighting and looked up at him with her big river-stone eyes. Unlike Hux’s mother’s, hers had tiny streaks of green running through them. The streaks were tenuous, like the first of spring’s leaves.

  “Your name was stitched on the corner of my blanket,” she said.

  Hux was still holding her wrists against the seat. He was tangled up in her long hair.

  “It wasn’t even really my blanket, was it?” she said as if that possibility hurt her more than the scratches on her face.

  “I don’t know,” Hux said, easing his grip on her.

  Naamah closed her eyes the way she had when she was eating that peppermint stick and only opened them when the heater came on, blowing summery air onto them.

  Outside the light turned from yellow to orange to pink.

  “What do you want?” she said, softening, which made Hux wonder which girl—this one or the one who’d traded herself for so little in the bar—was his sister.

  Hux didn’t know what he was doing in the logging camp any more than he knew what he was doing living alone in a rustic cabin deep in the Northwoods.

  Hux looked down at his sister. He thought of all the lost years, and even though he knew he couldn’t get them back—they couldn’t get them back—he wanted to try anyway. He wanted to make what was wrong right.

  Naamah was wearing a small silver cross on a chain around her neck, which pinched her skin a little at the clasp. She smelled like tobacco and peppermints.

  “I want to take you home,” Hux said.

  22

  Hux didn’t know what was more depressing: that all his sister’s earthly belongings fit into a cloth laundry bag or the bag itself, which she’d reinforced with electrical tape, or the fact that she wouldn’t let go of it. The whole way back to Evergreen, Naamah sat with the bag on her lap and a hand on the door as if at any moment she might change her mind, lift the handle, and tumble out of the truck onto the side of the road. The few moments she wasn’t holding the door, she was smoking or eating the beef jerky Hux bought at one of the gas stations near Yellow Falls because he was hungry (and nervous) and figured she was, too. He avoided Green River altogether because he didn’t want to think what Naamah would do if she saw Hopewell or Sister Cordelia again. Hux couldn’t get her moles out of his mind, her creaking bones. I love her still. He wondered if what he was doing was right.

  “You warm enough?” he said to Naamah when they were crossing the river, which had always felt like it belonged to Gunther and him alone. Hux saw her looking at the water, which the moonlight was making diamonds out of.

/>   “Is it cold?” she said.

  “I’m comfortable,” Hux said.

  “I mean the water,” Naamah said.

  “Another month, and it’ll be ice.”

  Naamah pressed her hand against the window. “Will you stop for a minute?”

  “All right,” Hux said, thinking she had to go to the bathroom or tend to some other womanly matter and didn’t want to say so. He pulled over when they got to the boat landing canoers used when they got tired and wanted to be taken back to Yellow Falls. Sometimes Hux found beer cans down here or bags of half-eaten potato chips or waterlogged hot-dog buns. He didn’t understand that kind of disrespect for the land but knew it was only a matter of time before those things started showing up around the cabin, too; people weren’t afraid of the woods the way they used to be. The pull of the river’s current.

  As soon as Hux parked the truck and put on the brake, Naamah was out the door, and though she left the laundry bag in the cab, she fled so quickly he thought she was running away from him. Her hair flew behind her like a black veil.

  “Wait,” he said, but she was already in the water, breaking its gemstone reflection.

  Hux got out of the truck and walked down to the river’s edge. After a few minutes, the water settled and the waves stopped lapping at his feet and he couldn’t see where she was anymore. He called for her, even though he didn’t feel like he had that right.

  She didn’t answer.

  Hux stood a whole hour at the river’s edge, listening for signs of his sister as the water floated by. Sometimes a branch would get caught on a rock out near the middle where the current was the strongest, and he’d think it was her for a minute. Or a frog would croak. Or a fish would splash. But Naamah never materialized. Maybe you couldn’t wake up without a sister and have one by nightfall and expect everything to be on its way to fine. Maybe all she’d ever agreed to was a ride out of the logging camp.

  A little after midnight, Hux went back to the truck to wait some more. He had a sleeping bag in the back and a jacket he could bunch up into a pillow.

  When he opened his door, he saw Naamah sitting there, and though he had no idea how she’d gotten herself out of the river and into the truck without him noticing, he was glad to see her. She was combing her long, wet hair with her fingers. River water pooled in the seat beneath her. The cab smelled like moss and fish.

  “I was watching you from a rock on the other side of the river,” she said. “You looked sad the way you were standing.”

  “I didn’t see you,” Hux said.

  “I didn’t want you to,” she said.

  The laundry bag was on the floor by the stick shift now. Her cowboy boots, too. The windows were fogging from all the moisture in the cab.

  “How long were you going to wait for me?” she said.

  “Until morning,” Hux said. “See if you changed your mind.”

  Naamah smiled, but not the brash way she did back in the logging camp. Sweetly. Her hands were shaking a little. Hux could see she was cold and rooted around until he found the sleeping bag, which he wrapped around her shoulders.

  “This is a mistake,” she said, fumbling for her cigarettes.

  In this light, her lips looked blue.

  “How do you figure?” Hux said.

  Naamah offered him a cigarette, and he took one out of the package. Her matches were wet, so he pushed the lighter in and waited for it to glow red.

  “I wouldn’t have waited that long for you,” she said when it finally did.

  Hux turned on the defroster, which cleared away the fog. After that he turned on the heater until she stopped shaking. He thought of his mother, their mother, how much she must have missed Naamah over the years. When Hux was little, she used to linger in the craft section of the general store. Hux would go off looking for candy or toys or both, and when he found what he wanted, he’d walk up and down the aisles searching for her. Almost always, he’d find her exactly where he’d left her: in front of the girls’ dress patterns or the boxes of hair ribbons. Sometimes he’d find her in front of the skeins of pink yarn, touching them as if they were made of more than just scratchy wool.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Hux said. “I already know my way home.”

  The first night in the cabin was strange and not strange and strange all over again; Hux would remember it for the rest of his life. At half past two, he and Naamah walked through the cabin door together for the first time. Hux had left the kitchen light on, which made the navigation up the uneven porch steps easier.

  Usually he didn’t think much about the way the cabin looked, but tonight he was distinctly aware of all its little flaws and eccentricities. To start, the window above the sink was covered with curtains made of two different kinds of fabric—one with strawberries all over it and the other with ears of corn—because years ago the general store ran out of one or the other. In the main part of the room, a plywood board was still nailed to the wall where a window should have been. After his father died, Hux brought back the tradition of putting up a sketch like his mother did when she was still alive. A larkspur was up there now. The cupboards were too high. The shelves were too low. And even though Hux liked sleeping in the bunk beds his father built, despite Leah’s protesting for a year straight about their lack of intimacy, they made him feel like a child now.

  Hux walked into the kitchen and set his keys on the counter. He’d done his best to clean up the mess from Gunther’s buck, but he saw now he’d missed a few thin streaks of blood on the tabletop. He should have made the cabin nice for her. Picked whatever wildflowers were left and stuck them in a vase. Bought her something at the dress shop in Yellow Falls. Perfume. Jewelry. A scarf. Something just for her.

  “What do we do now?” Naamah said. She reached out to touch the sugar bowl on the table but pulled her hand away suddenly as if she were afraid she was going to break it.

  “We sleep,” Hux said, because he didn’t know what else to do or to say and because his father used to say a good night of sleep gave a man’s nerve back to him. Hux knew Naamah would want to know more about their mother, about the reasons she was dropped off at the orphanage and he wasn’t, but he was hoping she wouldn’t ask tonight. He didn’t know how he was going to tell her what had happened.

  “All right,” she said.

  Before they settled in for the night, Hux cleared out a shelf in the closet for her, but she wouldn’t let go of the laundry bag.

  “Whatever’s in there is yours,” Hux said. “I won’t touch it. I promise.”

  He got out a hammer and a few nails and tacked a yellow sheet up over the opening to the closet. “I’ll change in the mudroom when I need to. You can change in here.”

  After Naamah put on a pair of old gray sweatpants and an equally old sweatshirt, Hux showed her to the top bunk bed, but she refused it. He even offered to switch with her and sleep up there instead, but Naamah wanted to sleep on the floor. She said the last time she slept in a bed was on a cot at the orphanage.

  “At least take a pillow,” Hux said.

  She patted the laundry bag. “I already have one.”

  “What about a blanket?”

  “I have one of those, too.”

  “Okay then,” Hux said and turned off the light. A moment later he turned it back on. “I forgot to show you the outhouse.”

  “I’ll find it if I need it,” she said.

  “It’s out back.”

  “They usually are.”

  “Okay then,” Hux said again, realizing how stupid he sounded after he turned out the light. He was relieved he couldn’t see her and she couldn’t see him, and wondered if she was, too. He didn’t regret bringing her back here; he just hadn’t thought far enough ahead about what they were supposed to do after they walked through the door. Maybe she hadn’t either. Tomorrow Hux needed to cut wood and haul it back to the cabin. He needed to catch some fish—bluegills, bass, pike, trout, walleyes—and smoke it, so he wouldn’t be stuck with potatoes all w
inter. He needed to work on Gunther’s buck so he could sell it to someone and get more supplies at the general store. Maybe he’d smoke some of that meat, too. Thinking about work calmed Hux a little, except he didn’t know what his sister normally did during the day up at the logging camp, what she’d do here. He didn’t take her for a woman who liked to bake pies, but she didn’t seem exactly like a lumberjack either.

  Normally Hux fell asleep easily. Leah used to say he was like a bear hibernating on the bunk bed. Tonight, though, he didn’t fall asleep until Naamah finally stopped thrashing around on the floor, clawing the air in her sleep.

  In the logging camp, she said she’d slept outside on the forest floor, and that’s where Hux found her when he woke after the first rays of golden light came through the kitchen window and swept across his face.

  “I’m sorry. I tried. I just couldn’t breathe in there,” she said when he asked her why she was curled up on a bed of brown pine needles just beyond the cabin. Her long black hair was twisted around her. She looked like a bird in a nest.

  “Okay,” Hux said, which wasn’t ever sentiment enough for Leah.

  “Okay,” Naamah said.

  Hux asked her if she wanted to chop some wood. He didn’t want to subject her to Gunther yet or share her with Phee. In a few days he’d take her across the river. “You don’t have to chop it, I mean. You could just come.”

  “I know how to use an ax,” she said, rising.

  So Hux took her, the axes, a few thick slices of bread, and a thermos of coffee into the woods. As they walked along the footpath, he pointed out different types of plants and mosses, showing her which were edible and which weren’t—This one I rubbed on my face as a boy, and I looked like a tomato for three days—but she already knew about them. He didn’t want to ask her how because he thought the story might involve the logging camp and the men there. He wanted to erase that part of her life by filling it with his.

  “This is a stinging nettle,” he said. “This is milk thistle.”

  Where else are they going to sit? he could hear his father saying.